SOURCE: Clifford, Caroline. “The Music of Multiculturalism in Leïla Sebbar's Le Chinois vert d'Afrique.” French Review 68, no. 1 (October 1994): 52-60.

[In the following essay, Clifford discusses the treatment of “les croisés”—characters who belong to more than one culture—as depicted in Leïla Sebbar's Le Chinois vert d'Afrique.]

Set in the present-day France of the increasing cultural tensions between immigrants and French de vieille souche, of the rising popularity of the Front National, and of a perceived need to defend French cultural purity, Leïla Sebbar's novels give a voice to the Beur children and other croisés growing up between the culture of their parents and that of the country in which they live. Sebbar ultimately affirms these children's right not to choose between cultures, but to incorporate distinct cultural particularities within a new composite identity. In Le Chinois vert d'Afrique (1984), she shows the characters with multiple cultural ties as more autonomous, less conscious of or limited by cultural boundaries, and ultimately more interesting than the characters that exist squarely within the French culture. Twelve-year-old Momo, of Vietnamese/Algerian father and Turkish mother, and fifteen-year-old Myra, of Italian mother and Moroccan father, emerge as strong and independent. On the other hand, the two French police officers, Bonnin and Mercier, are prescribed and limited to the point of being cartoonish because they act only in the strictest accordance with police regulations in their attempts to catch the “little savage,” Momo.

These characters represent two opposing forces at work in Le Chinois vert d'Afrique and the struggle between these forces provides the framework for the novel's narrative structure. Characters with multiple cultural ties, called “les croisés,” constitute the multicultural force, or actant in Mieke Bal's narratological terminology (Bal 26), and characters with ties only to one culture constitute the ethnocentric actant. These two actants work at cross purposes in the novel, the first striving for mobility, cultural pluralism within society and within personal identity, and the second for cultural homogeneity and the eradication of cultural differences. The narration of the struggle between these two actants in Le Chinois vert d'Afrique emphasizes alternance rather than hierarchy of elements, and thus expresses a multicultural theme. In this paper, I will examine the narrative structure of Sebbar's novel primarily by comparing its features to certain musical structures, but with the added theoretical support of Bal's narratology, in order to show how the particular structure of Le Chinois vert d'Afrique expresses a multicultural ideal.

For several reasons, music offers a privileged path to understanding Sebbar's novel. On a thematic level, music plays an important role in the lives of characters on both sides of the cultural divide. Momo plays the flute, Myra the piano, and Jean-Luc and Inspector Laruel have a fascination with opera. On a theoretical level, music lends an aspect of fluidity to the discussion of culture, as Julia Kristeva shows in Etrangers à nous-mêmes, a book which seeks to redefine notions of culture. Finally, the structure of language, upon which narratological concepts are based, is by definition linear and teleological (Yaguello 40), whereas the structure of music allows the superimposition or coexistence of elements within a single space and thus is a fitting tool with which to analyze a narrative with a multicultural ideal.

Etrangers à nous-mêmes provides an excellent starting point for an examination of the relationship between structure and intent in Sebbar's novel. In this book, Kristeva presents images of the foreigner in different time periods and different cultures, from ancient Greece to the European age of enlightenment to twentieth-century France. Her final chapter, “Pratiquement,” describes modern France as heterogeneous and contains clear evidence of a multicultural orientation similar to Sebbar's, “en France, en cette fin de XXe siècle, chacun est destiné à rester le même et l'autre: sans oublier sa culture de départ, mais en la relativisant au point de la faire non seulement voisiner, mais aussi alterner avec celle des autres” (288). Both Kristeva and Sebbar see French society as no longer only French, and as no longer mostly French and somewhat “foreign,” but as incorporating a multiplicity of cultures that exist side by side. Both authors suggest that people from these various cultures not try to erase their difference in order to meet the French standard, but affirm their own cultural particularities.¹

In her introductory chapter, Kristeva suggests that the reification of the strangeness of the foreigner is the most traditional way of keeping him or her at a distance. In order to close the gap between French and foreign, and to assure the possibility of the coexistence of various cultures, both an alleviation of the strangeness of the foreigner and an acknowledgement of universal strangeness are necessary, according to Kristeva. She recommends that we not “chercher à fixer, à chosifier l'étrangeté de l'étranger. Juste la toucher, l'effleurer, sans lui donner de structure définitive” (11). The deliberate fluid view of the foreigner is more than a practical suggestion for harmonious coexistence in present-day France; here Kristeva underscores the orientation of her book in which she presents the reader with multiple sketches of the foreigner. This collection of images creates a work whose structure, or fluid form, is similar to that of Sebbar's novel.

Furthermore, Kristeva's suggestion of a musical metaphor has parallels in Le Chinois vert d'Afrique. Kristeva says of the “strangeness” of the foreigner:

L'alléger aussi, cette étrangeté, en y revenant sans cesse—mais de plus en plus rapidement. S'évader de sa haine et de son fardeau, les fuire non par le nivellement et l'oubli, mais par la reprise harmonieuse des différences qu'elle suppose et propage. Toccatas et Fugues: les pièces de Bach évoquent à mes oreilles le sens que je voudrais moderne de l'étrangeté reconnue et poignante, parce que souleveé, soulagée, disséminée, inscrite dans un jeu neuf en formation, sans but, sans borne, sans fin.

(11)

The amorphous, directionless, and infinite movement Kristeva describes in her ideal “jeu neuf en formation” could easily apply to the central character of Sebbar's novel, Momo, who is characterized by motion and multiplicity. However, even more significant than this similarity is Kristeva's choice of a musical metaphor to explain her ideal view of cultural difference. In Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, several characters have a penchant for opera and Momo and Myra both play musical instruments, making music an important thematic element. I would like to argue that music can also be seen as playing an important part in the novel's structure. Following Kristeva's choice of the metaphor of toccata and fugue as a way of approaching cultural difference, I will use these terms as models for examining the structure of Sebbar's novel, a structure which, I believe, carefully supports Sebbar's validation of multiculturalism.

Toccata has been defined as “a virtuoso composition featuring sections of brilliant passage work, with or without imitative or fugal interludes” (Ness 859) In addition, “quasi-improvisatory disjunct harmonies” are identified as one of the principal elements of toccata style. The terms “brilliant passage work” and “disjunct harmonies” lend themselves well to a description of the mosaic-like composition in Le Chinois vert d'Afrique. In other words, the parallel emergence of a multiplicity of story lines results in achronicity or the impossibility of establishing a precise chronological order for narrated events (Bal 42). Sebbar's novel, although its narrative spans three generations, is anything but a developmental account of the creation of Momo's identity.

In fact, so many characters and different points of view are present in Le Chinois vert d'Afrique that it is incorrect to say the novel represents the story of Momo's life. Out of 241 pages of text, almost forty are devoted to the three cops and their investigation, eleven to Kader, Simone, and their son Karim, and four to Myra's music teacher Tina. These characters are accorded a place in the novel although Momo never comes into direct contact with the cops, meets Simone only briefly, and does not even know of Tina. The episodes involving these characters do not serve the purpose of fleshing out the presentation of Momo but exist in their own right, adjacent to the Momo episodes. The closing sentence of the “Tina” episode, in which Tina's relationships with Serge and Fiodor are described, is telling, “Tina ne parlait pas d'elle à Emile Cordier et Myra ne sut jamais rien de la vie amoureuse de Tina” (87). This sentence emphasizes the disjunct quality of the Tina and the Emile Cordier/Myra passages in this section and shows the fabula to be segmented in nature (Bal 24).

If some of the episodes appear as “disjunct harmonies,” others seem to emerge spontaneously, in the “quasi-improvisatory” style of the toccata. For example, at one point, Myra is described as playing the piano (89). She hears flute music through the window and remembers how Moroccan children played the flute while herding sheep. She recalls the time she listened to a young boy playing the flute for an hour until she was interrupted by her mother and grandmother sounding the car horn. The description of Myra's memory of the young flutist seems to emerge spontaneously from the description of her, in the present, listening to the flute music floating in through the window. In a similar way, Momo's memories of the way his mother made stuffed green peppers and of a specific time when he secretly returned home and enjoyed peppers Melissa had cooked emerge as Momo smells green peppers while walking down the street. These memory episodes are characteristic of the novel's improvisatory style and seemingly spontaneous production of narrative. These qualities, along with the achronicity and segmented nature of the fabula, show Sebbar's refusal of a teleological and hierarchical structure for her story.

If the disjunct episodes and improvisatory style of Le Chinois vert d'Afrique can be seen in terms of toccata, the dissemination of its cultural theme can be explained in terms of fugue. Ernest D. May defines fugue as “the most fully developed procedure of imitative counterpoint, in which the theme is stated successively in all voices of the polyphonic structure” (327) and adds that the structure of a fugue has been likened to that of a formal rhetorical discourse, of an argument, or of a debate (327-28). Susan McClary describes the structure of musical narratives in terms of a gendered conflict: “the masculine protagonist makes contact with but must eventually subjugate (domesticate or purge) the designated [feminine] Other in order for identity to be consolidated” (14). McClary adds that the Other need not necessarily be interpreted as female, but could incorporate anything that stands as a threat to identity (16). This addition taken into account, McClary's structural model of musical narrative can be applied to Le Chinois vert d'Afrique where the monocultural characters would function as the masculine protagonist force and the multicultural characters as the Other. The multicultural characters pose a threat to the identity of the monocultural characters precisely because they possess no cultural identity, no cultural oneness.

In Le Chinois vert d'Afrique the theme of cultural multiplicity is most clearly voiced by Momo and is repeatedly imitated or opposed by other characters. The letter of introduction Momo writes to Myra is significant in this regard, in both its form and content:

                    Mira,
Je sais ton nom.
Moi, c'est:
Mohamed pour mon père
Mehmet pour ma mère
Madou pour ma sœur Melissa
Hammidou pour ma grand-mère Minh
Momo pour les copains
ou Le Chinois
ou Le Chinois vert d'Afrique

M.

By according a new line to each of his names, Momo not only presents all his cultural ties, but shows them as equally important.² Even his signature does not favor one culture over another. Momo's identity can best be understood as a composite of discrete cultural particularities, and this composite identity is the main theme of Le Chinois vert d'Afrique.

This theme is repeated by other characters who are croisés, such as Karim and Nadia, Mélissa, Slim, Philippe the technician, Myra, Flora, and others. The composite identity or the multiplicity of cultural ties is explored at length in some instances, and only alluded to in others. For example, Karim's participation in both the Algerian Islamic circumcision ceremony and rural French pig slaughter are shown in detail and as equally important parts of his composite identity. The multiplicitous identity of other characters is only superficially stated, as in the case of Philippe the technician. Philippe meets Momo only briefly and explains that he is Eurasian, of Laotian mother and French father. This short exchange constitutes Philippe's entire role in the novel, yet it is powerful because it echoes the theme of multiplicity of cultural ties.

This theme is also indirectly repeated by monocultural characters who are in cross-cultural marriages, or who are accepting of and interested in people with multicultural ties. Characters such as Minh and Mohammed, Kader and Simone, and Emile Cordier and Marina fall into this first category, while Inspector Laruel and Jean-Luc the bookseller fall into the second. The cross-cultural marriages are generally characterized by an acceptance and even an embracing of the spouse's culture.³ Kader learns to enjoy the pork pâté and rillettes prepared by his wife Simone's mother, and Simone learns to make the chorba almost as well as Arab women. The Vietnamese Minh, even after her Algerian husband dies, remains in his natal village and takes care of his second wife.

The theme of cultural multiplicity, although not represented in such monocultural characters as Jean-Luc the bookseller and Inspector Laruel, is supported by them. These two characters could be viewed as helpers in Bal's terms because they ultimately support Momo in his goal of freedom from his parents, from the police investigators, and from cultural marginalization. Jean-Luc and Momo clearly have different cultural identities, as exemplified by Momo's refusal to take Jean-Luc with him to hear his friend Ali play the flute in cafés. “C'est pas pour toi” (75) explains Momo. However, despite these differences, Jean-Luc proves to be an accepting and generous friend. He allows Momo to trade with his bookstore clients, shares with him his love of Wagnerian opera, and offers his Cambodian friend Norodom a part-time job. Jean-Luc's generosity towards the two boys shows his acceptance of non-French cultures, an acceptance which serves, if not to echo the novel's theme, at least to uphold it.

Inspector Laruel's acceptance of cultural multiplicity is not quite as pervasive as Jean-Luc's, for it emerges gradually throughout the course of the investigation of Momo. At the outset, Laruel is every bit as monoculturally anchored as Bonnin and Mercier. When he cannot put his finger on the cultural identity of the boy, he posits him as exotic or culturally other, calling him an Indian, a Samourai, Bruce Lee, the Savage (16). However, Laruel's desire to classify and categorize, and his subsequent frustration with his inability to do so, is diminished once he recalls his experiences from the Algerian war while looking at Momo's war photographs. From this moment forward, Laruel has an affective tie to Momo and becomes increasingly fascinated with him. “Les enfants français des villes sont insipides, Bonnin, ce petit sauvage m'intéresse” (188) he admits. By the end of the novel, the work of investigating Momo's flight and taking inventory of his possessions has become Laruel's pretext to keep Bonnin and Mercier occupied so that Momo can escape.

Laruel's eventual protection of Momo and Jean-Luc's generosity towards Momo and Norodom show an appreciation of cultural multiplicity that, because of its source in monocultural characters, strengthens the novel's theme of fluid cultural identity. Not all the monocultural characters are as generous. The members of the neighborhood militia and the two cops, Bonnin and Mercier, view children from non-French cultures as subversive and threatening to their idea of French culture. These characters constitute the ethnocentric actant which opposes the multicultural actant discussed thus far. The conflict between the two groups serves to structure the novel as an argument or debate between various voices.

For Bonnin and Mercier, Momo is a bougnoule or a bronzé (43), a voyou who is wasting their time, a crazy kid who keeps changing his name (241). If only they could get their hands on him, they would teach him a lesson and make him pay for the trouble he has caused them. Bonnin and Mercier's desire to catch Momo, to limit his flight, and to beat him up shows their lack of understanding of his cultural difference. They wish to force him to enter into their traditional ethnocentric order where the majority of people resemble each other and those who are different do not cause trouble.

Bonnin and Mercier's view is not to be taken too seriously in this novel, however, for it is exaggerated and stereotypical. Sebbar portrays Bonnin and Mercier as relatively flat characters who act as the classic pair of buffoons. Although Bonnin's character is somewhat more developed than Mercier's, most of the time the two act as if they literally shared a brain between them. When the Inspector examines items they have retrieved from Momo's cabin, Bonnin and Mercier have identical reactions, they are both simultaneously bored, sleepy, hungry, passively silent, and tired. They even think simultaneously when Laruel smells the ink from a bottle confiscated during the investigation, “on dirait qu'il sniffe, pensent ensemble Bonnin et Mercier” (43), or when he decides that Momo must be an Arab, “Bonnin et Mercier avant lui ont pensé: un bougnoule presque en même temps” (43). The comic portrayal of Bonnin and Mercier is further enhanced by their dogged camaraderie in the face of Laruel's demands. In order to inventory the items confiscated from Momo's cabin, they prepare several sheets of typewriter paper with carbons in advance and one resignedly dictates while the other types (144). At the end of the novel, Bonnin reassures his friend Mercier that they will ultimately catch Momo, “te fais pas de bile, Bill, on l'aura” (241). The elements of simultaneous reactions and resigned camaraderie make Bonnin and Mercier into somewhat ridiculous figures. Although their ethnocentric discourse structurally opposes or balances the multicultural discourse of the other actant, it is humorously trivialized by Sebbar so that it cannot equal the opposing discourse in thematic power.

Emile Cordier's concerned neighbors constitute a second group of ethnocentric characters who oppose the multicultural characters. This group of community members, Monsieur André the car mechanic, Louis Petit of the police, Félix Lenoir the railroad worker, and Jean the taxi driver, is headed by the vociferous Tuilier, who was a radio technician in the war of Indochina. Tuilier talks to Emile Cordier of the unsafe nature of French suburbs due to the invasion of young hoodlums from government housing. He thinks that young Arabs are colonizing France and that a neighborhood militia is a necessary and legitimate defence.⁴ Although he has only briefly seen Momo wandering around the neighborhood and has no substantial rational cause to worry about his presence, Tuilier feels threatened by Momo's racial and cultural identity. He says to Cordier “j'ai juste vu ses cheveux, noirs et frisés […] vous voyez ce que je veux dire” (137) as if Momo's racial “otherness” were reason enough to suspect him of mischief. Tuilier's comment “ce gosse […] a une façon de traîner qui n'est pas très catholique” (169) is filled with irony for it underlines his distrust of Momo as well as the cultural difference between the boy and himself.

The neighborhood militiamen seek to exclude Momo from the community they are trying to keep culturally and racially homogenous. Whereas Momo signified an everyday annoyance and a strange, incomprehensible otherness to Bonnin and Mercier, he represents a threat to the neighborhood militiamen who cannot integrate him into their cultural order. A telling episode occurs when Louis Petit describes the recurring anti-police graffiti around the area: “Les flics sont tous des dèbe” (237). He is outraged at the attack on members of the police force, but perhaps even more so at the spelling mistakes and neologisms. He has no appreciation for the creation of the word dèbe from débile and cannot tolerate the absence of an “s” to make the word plural. In showing that Louis Petit views these as unacceptable deviations from the traditional grammatical order, Sebbar is making a reference to conservative institutions such as l'Académie française which attempt to preserve the perceived purity of French language in the face of the invasion of foreign words. In Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, these linguistic deviations are erased from the walls where they appear, in much the same way as Louis Petit would like to eliminate Momo's deviation from traditional French cultural order.

In this novel, the monocultural voices argue with the multicultural voices as is characteristic of the debate-like quality of a musical fugue. The term fugue has a double significance here because faire la fugue is Momo's main activity. He has left the restrictive shelter of his parents' house to live on his own in the cabanon des jardins, and spends much of his time fleeing the police. Momo's running is presented in a lyrical way in the seven short “Il court” sections that punctuate the novel. If the back and forth dialogue of the various monocultural and multicultural voices imitates the repetitive and responsive nature of musical fugue, the recurring “Il court” fragments can be viewed as a leitmotif. This comparison is particularly apt in light of the fact that the term leitmotif is most often used in connection with Wagner's works (Greenspan 443) and that Wagnerian opera figures prominently in Le Chinois vert d'Afrique as a deep interest for Jean-Luc, and subsequently, for Momo.

Wagnerian leitmotifs combine the compositional techniques of thematic recollection with thematic transformation (Greenspan 443-44). In Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, the “Il court” fragments function as lyrical reiterations of the novel's most important action, but do not announce a transformation because the movement of this action is circular rather than developmental. In the first fragment, the narrator stresses “il n'a pas l'air de quelqu'un qui se sauve” (9) and in subsequent fragments alludes to the time when “il” will return. If these fragments recall Momo's very real flight to escape the police, they also work on a figurative level as a more positive emblem of his identity.⁵

The boy in the “Il court” sections runs so gracefully and instinctively that onlookers step aside so as not to disturb his rhythm. He does not look back, does not run out of breath, and stops only briefly to pick up a piece of bread on the side of the road or to write a quick note to Myra. “Il court, souple. Souverain” (47) says the narrator. The word souverain is significant, for it shows the power inherent in Momo's desire for and successful possession of autonomy. Against all the forces that try to limit him physically or marginalize him culturally, Momo is victorious. He refuses to be caught and he defies categorization, all the while affirming his composite multicultural identity through constant movement and contact with people from a variety of cultural backgrounds.

The musical concepts of leitmotif, toccata, and fugue work well as models with which to examine the structure of Le Chinois vert d'Afrique. Many of the novel's episodes emerge spontaneously, as in the improvisatory style of the toccata. The theme of cultural multiplicity is one that is alternately affirmed by multicultural voices, opposed by monocultural voices, and reaffirmed by certain other monocultural voices. The successive imitation of and response to the statement of the multicultural theme recalls the conversational or debate-like nature of fugue. The “Il court” fragments reiterate the main action of the novel, in the manner of a leitmotif, and pull a thread of continuity and profound lyricism through the collection of episodes. On the whole the narrative fragments balance each other to form an intricate composition which supports Sebbar's theme and ideal of the coexistence of cultural particularities in a multicultural world.

Notes

1. In Lettres parisiennes, Leïla Sebbar says of children of immigrant parents living in France: “je les voudrais inassimilés, singuliers et violents, forts de leurs particularismes et de leur capacité de saisir la modernité” (60).

2. This parataxis of identities recalls Kristeva's description of the necessary alternation or juxtaposition of cultural identities in present-day France.

3. It is important to note that even in the less durable or unified cross-cultural marriages, it is not specifically the spouses' difference of cultures that causes them to part, but rather life-style differences or work constraints.

4. Jean the taxi driver goes a step further, describing the situation as he sees it as being gnawed away by rats.

5. In an interview with Monique Hugon, Leïla Sebbar explains that faire la fugue is not only a running away from a limiting environment, but also a running towards new encounters: “ce n'est pas un hasard si tous les héros que je choisis et que j'aime sont des fugueurs; ‘fuguer,’ cela veut dire sortir du ghetto, cela veut dire ‘rencontrer,’ souvent dans des situations de conflit; mais ces situations de conflit sont aussi porteuses d'autre chose, elles ne sont pas seulement destructrices” (37).

Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.

Greenspan, Charlotte. “Leitmotif.” The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Ed. Don Michael Randel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Hugon, Monique. “Leïla Sebbar ou l'exil productif.” Propos recueillis. Notre Librairie 84 (1986): 32-37.

Huston, Nancy, and Leïla Sebbar. Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l'exil. Paris: Barrault, 1986.

Kristeva, Julia. Etrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Fayard, 1988.

May, Ernest D. “Fugue.” The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Ed. Don Michael Randel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

Ness, Arthur J. “Toccata.” The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Ed. Don Michael Randel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Sebbar, Leïla. Le Chinois vert d'Afrique. Paris: Stock, 1984.

Yaguello, Marina. Alice au pays du langage. Paris: Seuil, 1981.