SOURCE: “Colonialism, Polyvocality, and Islam in L'aventure ambiguë and Le Devoir de violence,” in MLN, Vol. 107, No. 5, December, 1992, pp. 1000-27.

[In the following essay, Wehrs analyzes the many voices of postcolonial Africa contained in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambiguë and Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence.]

Much African fiction, such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), presents Western colonialism as the means by which an hegemonic, monological culture of imperialism displaces traditional cultures characterized by religions and rituals that recognize through polytheism a plurality of truths, or forces, or perspectives, and that recognize through democratic or deliberative political institutions a plurality of voices and interests.¹ In this way, anti-colonial fiction may suggest a deep conceptual and moral affinity between the polyvocality affirmed by many African societies and the polyvocality that Mikhail Bakhtin sees as constitutive of dialogic, novelistic discourse.² By contrast, Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambiguë (1961) and Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence (1968) present African cultures shaped in their fundamental metaphysical and political premises by the single-voicedness of the Quran and by the Islamic doctrine of unity as it applies to God, truth, and community. The dialogical imagination may be intolerant only of monological thought, but when such thought lies at the heart of a culture, insistence upon the “dialogical” itself might become a form of imperialism. To the extent that the novel, as a genre, is characterized by a Bakhtinian resistance to monologue through dialogical language and the articulation of a plurality of heterogeneous voices, it might risk complicity with colonialism. Both Kane and Ouologuem make their novels' very existence as novels part of their interrogation of the “ambiguous adventure” of Islamic Africa's encounter with the West.

Kane describes the spiritual struggle of a young African nobleman, Samba Diallo, torn between the influence of his Islamic spiritual master and the influence of Western secularism; Samba's internal turmoil revolves around his relationship with a succession of voices: the voices of his Islamic master, his pious and conservative father, his pragmatic and accommodationist aunt, his European teachers and Parisian friends. But from the first page of the novel, the solicitation of these human voices to “dialogue” is contrasted with the demand of the voice of God not for a response, but for recitation. The novel's first three sentences drive home the point: “Ce jour-là, Thierno [the Islamic master] l'avait encore battu. Cependant, Samba Diallo savait son verset. Simplement sa langue lui avait fourché” (13). The master grabs him by the earlobe and pierces the cartilage with his fingernails while forcing the boy to merge his voice with God's; the boy reflects:

Cette parole n'était pas comme les autres. C'était une parole que jalonnait la souffrance, c'etait une parole venue de Dieu, elle était un miracle, elle était telle que Dieu lui-même l'avait prononcée. Le maître avait raison. La parole qui vient de Dieu doit être dite exactement, telle qu'il Lui avait plu de la façonner. Qui l'oblitère mérite la mort. … Sa voix était calme et son débit mesuré. La Parole de Dieu coulait, pure et limpide, de ses lèvres ardentes. … Cette parole qu'il enfantait dans la douleur, elle était l'architecture du monde, elle était le monde même.

(14–15)

Kane emphasizes that “knowing” the Word (savoir) is insufficient, because that implies being a subject apprehending an object, and hence being in a position to measure and otherwise evaluate the object from some “outside,” neutral position. Recitation lies at the heart of the master's teaching because it elides the distance (existential and critical) indicated by “savoir”: one cannot stand outside the Word because it constitutes “the architecture of the world,” “the world itself.”³ Recitation functions both as the ritualistic acknowledgment of absolute metaphysical claims and as the ritualistic acculturation of mind and body to participation in a “reality” constituted by those claims.⁴

Within this context, the “ambiguous” becomes identified with all that holds Samba back from merging into God's monologue: the material world, earthly desires, other voices—especially feminine and Westernized ones. Just as Samba must conquer his pain to recite well, so the faithful must turn away from a polyvocality associated with the material, the natural, the feminine, and the Western. Through technological superiority, the West has conquered Samba's homeland; through its capacity to satisfy material needs, the West threatens to exile Samba and his countrymen from dwelling within the “architecture” constituted by the Word. Kane notes, “L'école nouvelle participait de la nature du canon et de l'aimant à la fois. Du canon, elle tient son efficacité d'arme combattante. Mieux que le canon, elle pérennise la conquête. Le canon contraint les corps, l'école fascine les âmes” (60). The sexualizing and feminizing of the threat is important: elle tient son efficacité d'arme combattante; elle pérennise la conquête; elle fascine les âmes. The strongest advocate for Western education among the African elite is Samba's formidable aunt, La Grande Royale, who in bearing and actions little resembles a traditional Islamic woman: “L'Islam refrénait la redoutable turbulence de ces traits, de la même façon que la violette les enserrait” (31). Feared and respected, she “tranchait par voie d'autorité” (31): in her youth, she pacified the haughty Northern tribes “par sa fermeté” (32). Her face resembles “une page vivante de l'histoire du pays des Diallobé” (31), suggesting an intense connection with her people's pre-Islamic, epic-heroic past. However, she uses her “masculine” forcefulness to argue for Western education because she believes it will serve her people in those areas of life that Islam traditionally associates with women: the material, the natural, the finite, the maternal.⁵ Acting as a surrogate mother to both Samba and her people, she tells the Islamic master, “Cet enfant parle de la mort en termes qui ne sont pas de son âge. Je venais vous demander, humblement, pour l'amour de ce disciple que vous chérissez, de vous souvenir de son âge, dans votre oeuvre d'edification” (35). After the master recalls how her own father died focused exclusively on the Word, she replies, “Je vénère mon père et le souvenir que vous en avez. Mais je crois que le temps est venu d'apprendre à nos fils à vivre. Je pressens qu'ils auront affaire à un monde de vivants où les valeurs de mort seront bafouées et faillies” (38). In a similar manner, at a public assembly she tells the people to send their children to the French school: “L'école où je pousse nos enfants tuera en eux ce qu'aujourd'hui nous aimons et conservons avec soin, à juste titre” (57). La Grande Royale justifies such “killing” through an analogy with agriculture, thereby identifying her maternal solicitude with the “fierce” processes by which nature sustains physical life: “Nous aimons bien nos champs, mais que faisons-nous alors? Nous y mettons le fer et le feu, nous les tuons. De même, souvenez-vous: que faisons-nous de nos réserves de graines quand il a plu? Nous voudrions bien les manger, mais nous les enfouissons en terre” (57). La Grande Royale's use of the agricultural analogy is the exact opposite of how it is used by Christ in John 12:24: “[E]xcept a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” In Christianity, as in Islam, the spirit has ontological priority over the flesh, but La Grande Royale proposes sacrificing the cultural traditions within which the soul dwells so that the body may live.

The question becomes one of what true life is. The Islamic master explains his refusal to moderate his treatment of Samba in the following terms:

Vous voyez que je blesse la vie dans votre jeune cousin, et vous vous dressez en face de moi. La tâche, cependant, ne m'est pas agréable, ni facile. Je vous prie de ne point me tenter, et de laisser à ma main sa fermeté. Après cette blessure profonde, pratiquée d'une main paternelle, je vous promets que plus jamais cet enfant ne se blessera. Vous verrez de quelle stature, lui aussi, dominera la vie et la mort.

(38)

Whereas La Grande Royale urges an accommodation with the forces of life (indeed, she urges that human culture take nature as its model), the Islamic master argues that only an education in submission, in Islam, can grant one the spiritual resources to dominate “la vie et la mort.” For the Islamic master, as for Samba's father and the other pious men of the novel, true freedom is found not in the technological manipulation of nature to satisfy material needs, but in the domination of nature through an education in submitting the body to the uncompromising demands of the spirit. What one is freed from, in this view, is the polyvocality of nature and the material, a polyvocality that draws one away from the one voice that matters absolutely. Samba's father reflects:

L'homme civilisé, n'est-ce pas l'homme disponible? Disponible pour aimer son semblable, pour aimer Dieu surtout. Mais, lui objectera une voix en lui-même, l'homme est entouré de problèmes qui empêchent cette quiétude. Il naît dans une forêt de questions. La matière dont il participe par son corps—que tu hais—le harcèle d'une cacophonie de demandes auxquelles il faut qu'il réponde: ‘Je dois manger, fais-moi manger?’, ordonne l'estomac. ‘Nous reposerons-nous enfin? Reposonsnous, veux-tu?’ lui susurrent les membres. … Les voix les plus criardes tentent de couvrir les autres. Cela est-il bon? La civilisation est une architecture de réponses. Sa perfection, comme celle de toute demeure, se mesure au confort que l'homme y éprouve, à l'appoint de liberté qu'elle lui procure.

(80–81)

This quest for domination and regulation of the natural ought not be confused with either Christian renunciation of the flesh or Hindu and Buddhist detachment from the material. Whereas the Christian would die to the flesh to be reborn in spirit and the Hindu and Buddhist would transcend the material through apprehending it as illusory, the Muslim would regard the material as good in itself but in need of “domination” by the spirit lest it engender rebellion, chaos, disorder: fitna.⁶ Mohamed Ahmed Sherif notes that Ghazali (1058–1111), probably the most influential theoretician of Islamic ethics, argued that

[t]raining the faculties of the soul does not entail uprooting or completely suppressing the faculties of the animal soul, which can only occur after death. It does, however, imply their subordination to the practical reasoning faculty so that the soul is directed towards the right goal, which is happiness. … [Therefore,] good character is achieved when the deliberative faculty of the human soul subordinates the irascible and concupiscent faculties of the animal soul.

(30, 34–35)

This conceptualizing of the ethical problem as one of the proper regulation of a hierarchy leads to conceiving any “voice,” any locus of value, that challenges or complicates the order of rank as a potential threat to ultimate happiness, as an invitation to fitna, which might imperil salvation. Fatima Mernissi points out that fitna (disorder or chaos) also means “a beautiful woman—the connotation of a femme fatale who makes men lose their self-control” (31). Such a semantic range is explicable when we remember that for Ghazali,

the highest form of restraint … ['iffah, the Arabic translation of the Aristotelian sōphrosunē (moderation, temperance)] is to refrain from anything in this world which does not directly aim at ultimate happiness. This ascent of temperance from simple restraint of desire to the exclusion of everything which is not necessary for the ultimate end of spiritual salvation shows how Ghazali broadens the meaning of temperance, not only to include Islamic religious restraint, but also a high ideal of religious asceticism.

(Sherif 64–65)

By locating the struggle for Samba's soul in the conflict between the claims of a polyvocal, heterogeneous, ambiguous, and feminine nature on the one hand and the claims of an univocal, categorical, hierarchical, and masculine cultural architecture on the other hand, Kane gives novelistic articulation to themes and traditions deeply embedded in Islamic philosophy and practice, themes and traditions not just antithetical to Western modernity but also to West African polytheism. C. L. Innes has recently observed that

[t]he Igbo community presented to us in Things Fall Apart is one which has established a balance, though sometimes an uneasy one, between the values clustered around individual achievement and those associated with community, or between materialism and spirituality. Those groups of values tend to be identified as masculine and feminine respectively and are epitomized in the two proverbs, ‘Yam is King,’ and ‘Mother is supreme,’ which dominate the first and second parts of the novel.

(25–26)

Similarly, Kwame Gyekye and Robert Pelton have recently explored how the philosophy and mythology of the Akan-Ashanti people of Ghana balances the claims of above and below, the sky and the earth, the masculine and feminine in ways that suggest that the life of the society depends upon a plurality of divine voices, a range of diverse values, being taken into account.⁷

With Islam, it is otherwise. The Quran serves as the source for a “cultural architecture” that recognizes the polyvocal, the ambiguous, the interplay of heterogeneities upon which natural life depends,⁸ but views all that as something to be “dominated” through an education in submitting one's “natural” multi-voicedness to the cadences of God's voice. As Clifford Geertz notes, “The Quran … differs from the other major scriptures of the world in that it contains not reports about God by a prophet or his disciples, but His direct speech, the syllables, words, and sentences of Allah” (1983 110). The single-voicedness and unidirectionality of the Quran's discourse makes the articulated will of God the foundation of the community of the faithful and precludes any space for a “reality” apart from that articulation: “And Allah has made for you, of what He has created, shelters, and He has given you in the mountains, places of retreat, and He has given you garments to save you from the heat, and coats of mail to save you in your fighting. Thus does He complete His favour to you that you may submit” (Sura 16:81). The concept of reality this implies is fundamentally alien to the modern Western notion of a “neutral space” about which different individuals can have different “perspectives” and upon which we may “project” our “interpretations.”⁹ Within the conceptual architecture of Islam, the “real” (haqq) is inherently partisan and clarity of understanding requires an elision of distance by merging one's own nature and history into that partisan “reality.”¹⁰

The community that brings one into participation with the right and the real is, first of all, a community of males. There have been numerous recent studies of the image of women in Islam.¹¹ Their basic direction may be summarized by M. E. Combs-Schilling: despite countercurrents, sometimes quite powerful ones, in the Prophet's life and in the Quran,

Islam's dominant sexual culture allocates to women the position of being that part of humanity that is closest to nature and hence least able to transcend its natural drives, including sexual impulses, and therefore least able to connect with the divine who exists beyond the natural realm. Consequently, females are understood to be in need of male supervision, because men—in the culture's imagination—are defined as able to keep their natural inclinations in control.

(92)

Indeed, Ghazali divides “practical science” into three parts: “man's relations with other men” (political science); “the governance of the household, … the manner of living with one's wife, children, and servants”; and ethics proper (ilm al-akhlāq), which he defines as dealing “with the way man ought to act to be good and virtuous in his character and qualities” (Sherif 4).¹² Being closer to nature, women are drawn to caring for the body, attending to its plurality of voices. At the center of Islam lies the myth of Ibrahim's sacrifice of his son—the community of faith is created at the moment when the voice of nature is stilled:

Because Ibrahim is willing to slay the child at divine command, God provides a substitute—a ram—and restores the child to the father, for long life on earth and eternal life thereafter. What is more, by withstanding the trial, Ibrahim creates for all of humanity a means of divine connection. … The culture constructs a sacrificial intercourse and birth that overcomes the limitations of male-female intercourse and female birth and makes it an all-male event—even in terms of the animal substitute. The ram is not simply male; he is quintessentially male.

(Combs-Schilling 236; 239)

This spiritual birth requires the marginalization of women because feminine responsiveness to natural ties prevents their acceptance of the ontological hierarchy implied in the sacrifice.

Clearly, the struggle between the Islamic master and La Grande Royale over Samba's education echoes the cultural patterns of understanding articulated by the Ibrahim myth. Indeed, Samba's story may be seen as a reversal, or undoing, of the Ibrahim myth; instead of being excluded from the scene, as is Hajar, La Grande Royale is consulted and her valorization of individual physical life prevails over masculine appeals to spiritual values: Samba is sent first to the local French school and then to Paris. La Grande Royale “wins” because her brother, the chief of the Diallobé, fears that his people will perish unless the elite, through Western education, learns “la connaissance des arts et l'usage des armes, la possession de la richesse et la santé du corps …” (44–45). Like Ibrahim, the chief is faced with the prospect of the extinction of his line; unlike Ibrahim, he yields to “temptation” because he accepts La Grande Royale's claim that European colonialism has demonstrated the separation of the real from the right. She argues, “[I]l faut aller apprendre chez eux l'art de vaincre sans avoir raison” (47). To accept the necessity of Western education is to reject the conception of “reality” demarcated by the word haqq: once that is rejected, the goal of education shifts from entrance into a community formed by recitation to the achievement of a critical distance that allows one to adjudicate between a heterogeneous array of competing voices, each with its “just” claim.

The education that Samba leaves behind has as its base the ideal of integration into the community of the faithful, the umma, through the inculcation of adab—a term that carries a breadth of implication similar to the Greek paideia and the Latin morales.¹³ Ira M. Lapidus defines it as “correct knowledge and behavior in the total process by which a person is educated, guided, and formed into a good Muslim …” (39). Adab involved an internalization of stylized self-discipline, as in Samba's chanting the Quranic verse well even as his master's fingernails bite through his earlobe.¹⁴ This training is coupled with and guided by knowledge, understood in the complex sense covered by the Arabic word ilm. Lapidus notes that ilm refers to “the material of any literate education, but, particularly, it denotes the religious knowledge imparted by the Qur'an, hadīth [traditions and legends about the Prophet and his first followers], and shari'a [the religious law]. Beyond specific religious subjects, ilm encompasses the knowledge of all essential matters revealed by God, and belief in the truth of that knowledge. Ilm, then, is not just intellectual knowing, but knowing charged with feeling. Ilm is insight—an experience of the reality of what is known …” (39). The concept of ilm involves “practical wisdom” in the Aristotelian sense of phronēsis, a form of knowing that implies a form of being, adab and paideia, 'iffah and sōphrosunē: but it also involves the range of meaning covered by the Greek doxa, the received consensus of the community.¹⁵ However, unlike that of Aristotle, the Islamic conception of practical wisdom shaped by communal consensus and traditions is co-extensive with metaphysics and relevation: Oliver Leaman points out that when

Aristotle famously expresses doubts concerning the possibility of determinate answers to normative questions (NE 1.3, 1094^b 12–18), Averroes [Ibn Rushd] dissipates the Aristotelian vagueness and argues that the answers to ethical questions are to be found in a radically different kind of book, in a study of metaphysics, which could determinately relate the study of the nature of the most desirable end for human beings to the nature of those human beings and their position in the structure of things in the universe.

(132–133)

By contrast, as Martha Nussbaum has forcefully demonstrated, Aristotle emphasizes the improvisational, “rough-and-ready” quality of practical wisdom; standing within the culture that produced Greek tragedy from polytheistic traditions, Aristotle regards responsiveness to the “just” claims of competing values, of heterogeneous voices, as a central good.¹⁶ It is notable in this vein that, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, “sōphrosunē is for the Greeks the womanly virtue …” (1984 136). While there is no lack of intellectual diversity within the Islamic tradition, dialogue is joined within the horizon, inside the community, demarcated by haqq and ilm.¹⁷

When Samba's education shifts to the study of French literature and philosophy, he is exiled from dwelling within the conceptual-existential universe described by haqq, ilm, and adab. Abiola Irele characterizes Samba's spiritual anguish as a “failure to achieve a reconciliation between [Western] intellectual disengagement and his continued emotional attachment to his antecedents. … Against the African conception of a personalized universe with which man establishes a familiar and warm relationship, Samba Diallo meets the European conception in which the universe is an objective, impersonal factor, removed from consciousness by the very opacity of its material structure, and without any meaning for man except as a means to the expression of his conquering spirit” (171).¹⁸ While this reading is accurate, it could serve equally well to describe the experience of an African from a polytheistic culture. Kane's novel emphasizes, however, that the world into which Samba moves is alien precisely because it is “polyvocal.” He renounces the adventure of ambiguity by refusing to identify the polyvocal with the real and by rejecting the ethical and ontological claim of the feminine. Early in his studies in Paris, Samba argues that until Descartes, Western and non-Western thought shared a common purpose: “Au fond, le projet de Socrate ne me paraît pas différent de celui de saint Augustin, bien qu'il y ait eu le Christ entre eux. … C'est encore le projet de toute pensée non occidentale. … Descartes est plus parcimonieux dans sa quête; si, grâce à cette modestie et aussi à sa méthode, il obtient plus de réponses, ce qu'il apporte nous concerne moins aussi, et nous est de peu de secours” (126). With Descartes, the quest for technological mastery becomes a substitute for relating human existence to an order that renders it significant. Samba's analysis is supported by Hans Blumenberg's argument that, in the ancient and medieval worlds, theory functions as a form of contemplation that reassures man of his teleologically-ordained place and philosophy functions, especially in Stoicism and Skepticism, as a means of curing human reason of its tendency to trouble the soul with fruitless speculations; the modern conception of theory as activity, as the means of controlling and shaping nature, began to emerge when Nominalism eroded confidence that the world and human nature were made to “fit” each other “naturally.” In the absence of that fit, man must depend upon his own investigating skill, his “method,” to find the order in nature and to bring nature into human service.¹⁹ Similarly, Charles Taylor argues that in making reason into a method for the technological mastery of nature, Descartes “abandoned any theory of ontic logos. The universe was to be understood mechanistically. … Plato's theory of ideas involved a very close relation between scientific explanation and moral vision. … If we destroy this vision of the ontic logos and substitute a very different theory of scientific explanation, the entire account of moral virtue and self-mastery has to be transformed as well” (144). Clearly, the Islamic concepts of haqq and ilm rest upon holding together what Western thought since Descartes has divided; the understanding of ethical life as “our connecting up to the larger order in which we are placed” (Taylor 123) is deeply embedded in the Islamic tradition's fusion of Aristotelian virtues and neo-Platonic metaphysics.²⁰ Samba prays to retain an identity defined by connection: “Souviens-Toi, comme tu nourrissais mon existence de la tienne. … Je te sentais la mer profonde d'où s'épandait ma pensée et en même temps qu'elle, tout. Par toi, j'étais le même flot que tout” (139). However, he is confronted with a world where those who deny God grow rich, where the right and the real seem severed, where competing claims clamor for his attention, where the “real” seems reducible to value-neutral fields of quantifiable objects. Walking through Paris, he thinks, “Oui … je suis Malte Laurids Brigge. Comme lui, je descends le boulevard Saint-Michel. Il n'y a rien … que moi … que mon corps, veux-je dire. … Il n'y a rien, que mon gros orteil droit” (141).

Unlike Malte Laurids Brigge, who seeks to overcome disconnection in a secular, disenchanted world by attending to the voices of women, by taking the limitless, unconditional love of the Portuguese nun as his model,²¹ Samba's dialogues with women lead to temptations he ultimately rejects. When his Marxist friend, Lucienne, urges Samba to renounce traditionalism in favor of Leninism, she describes his country as a nurturing but stifling mother: “[L]e lait que tu as sucé aux mamelles du pays des Diallobé est bien doux et bien noble. … Mais, sache-le aussi, plus la mère est tendre et plus tôt vient le moment de la repousser …” (155–156). Samba responds by treating both maternal, natural ties and Lucienne's advice as equivalent seductions: “Je crois que je préfère Dieu à ma mère” (156). When he encounters Adèle, the daughter of a family of Westernized Africans, who aspires to counteract the effects of having spent her entire life in Europe by taking Samba as her teacher, he rebuffs her, refusing the seduction of being regarded by a pretty young woman as the Romantic, exotic Other. When she declares, “Alors, tu dois m'apprendre à pénétrer dans le coeur du monde,” Samba replies, “Je ne sais pas si on retrouve jamais ce chemin, quand on l'a perdu …” (173–174). Recognizing his rejection of her, she cries, breaks off the discussion, and asks to be taken home. Left alone, having resisted the spiritual dangers posed by Lucienne and Adèle, Samba experiences a vision of the Islamic master calling him home: “Toi, qui ne t'es jamais distrait de la sagesse des ténèbres, qui, seul, détiens la Parole, et as la voix forte suffisamment pour rallier et guider ceux qui se sont perdus, j'implore …” (174). Upon his return from France, Samba is hounded by “le fou,” a pious, deranged follower of the deceased Islamic master, and when he neglects the Fool's call for evening prayers, he is struck down. When Samba either awakens or dies (it is unclear, and in a deeper sense equivalent), his subjectivity is enfolded within the voice of Islam, which announces, “Tu entres où n'est pas l'ambiguïté” (190). As John Erickson notes, “A spirit of darkness and peace addresses him, perhaps Azrael, the Angel of Death, who announces the coming of a new world” (200). In this new world, the natural and the feminine no longer threaten: “Dans la forteresse de l'instant, l'homme, en vérité, est roi, car sa pensée est toutepuissance, quand elle est” (190). In the novel's final sentences, ultimate reality is enfolded into the I-thou cadences of Quranic verse: “Je te regarde, et tu durcis dans l'Etre. Je n'ai pas de limite. Mer, la limpidité de ton flot est attente de mon regard. Je te regarde, et tu reluis, sans limites. Je te veux, pour l'éternité” (191). Kane's novel concludes by turning away from the heterogeneous, polyvalent forms of experience to which novelistic discourse, in Bakhtin's view, is acutely attuned. By completing the spiritual journey initiated by the opening recitation, Samba renounces not just secular materialism and the ethics of ambiguity and irony embedded in the Western novelistic tradition, but also the moral and social vision of African polytheism, as Wole Soyinka's impatience with the Islamic master's position indicates: “When life is apprehended solely through its negation, death, existence becomes defined as a temporal illusion. … In the struggle of the secular need against the claims of mystic decadence the Teacher has the final say, and it is No. The Word emerges triumphant” (84–85).

On one level, Le Devoir de violence may be read as a multi-voiced protest on the part of African polytheism against both Islamic and European forms of colonization. Against the single-voicedness of the authoritative Word, Ouologuem creates a text in which the whole concept of voice as a locus of authority is travestied; in a work in which the lines between allusion, parody, and plagiarism are systematically transgressed, every word is saturated with a polyvalence that replicates linguistically the sado-masochistic textures of the “history” it recounts.²² The novel's opening sentences evoke the possibility of community, violate that expectation with abrupt, contemptuous distance, and then suggest that the narrative can only be faithful to the community's traditions by mirroring the sado-masochistic modes of interaction that give its people a “shared” past: “Nos yeux boivent l'éclat du soleil, et, vaincus, s'étonnent de pleurer. Mashallah! oua bismillah! … Un récit de l'aventure sanglante de la négraille—honte aux hommes de rien!—tiendrait aisément dans la première moitié de ce siècle; mais la véritable histoire des Nègres commence beaucoup, beaucoup plus tôt, avec les Saïfs, en l'an 1202 de notre ère …” (9). Ouologuem's “aventure,” unlike Kane's, involves not the spiritual struggles of a single nobleman, but the fleshly sufferings of the multitudes who are divested not only of status, but also of humanity: “la négraille.” The interplay of multiple perspectives (for example, the contrast between “Nos yeux boivent l'éclat du soleil” and the ejaculation, “honte aux hommes de rien!”) leads to a dispossession of voice that is, in part, a radicalization of Romantic irony. The exclamation, “honte aux hommes de rien!” may (a) express contempt for the négraille's susceptibility to victimization, (b) dramatize the contempt of the Saïfs and notables, (c) show how the négraille's abjectness invites contempt, solicits violence as a “devoir,” (d) attack the Saïfs and notables and the West by articulating and hence mocking their contempt, (e) reveal the contempt a contemporary African must experience as a “devoir” to separate himself from cultural patterns of victimization, (f) disclose (and lament) the internalization and mechanistic repetition of psychic aggression and so underscore, paradoxically, the solidarity of masochism between the implied author and the world his text evokes—for a solidarity of masochism may be the African past's peculiar legacy to its children. Lilian Furst notes that if the distance collapses between an ironic narrator and the objects of irony, “[t]he sense of disorientation generated by Romantic irony is intensified … into an intuition of utter anarchy. And just as the narrative strategies of Romantic irony were a direct reflection of its stance, so here too the derangement is graphically represented in the marked preference for labyrinths, for montage, for circular involutions, for the grotesque, for the ironization of the fictional irony, for parody and self-parody” (303–304). While Le Devoir de violence clearly draws upon the European avant-garde tradition of radicalized, “unstable irony,”²³ it also suggests, through its deployment of a plurality of voices and investment of polyvalency within any given “voice,” traditional West African connections between the heterogeneity and multidimensionality of language and a multiplicity of divine and natural forces that shape a complex, polyvocal reality. Henry Louis Gates argues that in associating interpretation with the trickster god Esu, the Yoruba people conceive “[i]ndeterminacy … as an unavoidable aspect of acts of interpretation” (22), for Esu “is figured as paired male and female statues, which his/her devotees carry while dancing, or as one bisexual figure” (29); “Esu's two sides ‘disclose a hidden wholeness’; rather than closing off unity, through opposition, they signify the passage one to the other as sections of a subsumed whole. … Esu is a figure of doubled duality, of unreconciled opposites, living in harmony” (30). In a similar way, Ouologuem's people, the Dogon of southern Mali, associate the fluidity, surprisingness, and wonder of language with a pluralistic, polytheistic cosmos: “The Dogon term for symbol is aduno so, ‘the word of the world’; for myth, it is so tanie, ‘amazing word’; and for the whole mythology that is their sacred history, aduno so tanie. Thus the Dogon know well that the story of their existence embodies that existence. This story manifests the life of the world because, in some deep sense, it is the world itself in human speech” (Pelton 167).

Ouologuem reconstructs African history as a dark inversion of Dogon mythology; moving from the brisk recounting of centuries of violence, slavery, and treachery in the first two chapters, the long third chapter, “La Nuit des Géants,” reveals through the story of two generations of a slave family, the Kassoumis, how the processes of the past replicate themselves in the present, how “the story of their existence”—of their coming to be slaves and négraille—“embodies that existence” as slaves and négraille. The novel's incessant self-display, its indictment of its own language and technique, suggests that, “in some deep sense, it is the world [that it portrays] in human speech.” The opening narrative notes how, “devant la ‘bénédiction’ implacable de Dieu,” the blacks dispersed “enfin le long des savanes limitrophes de l'Afrique équatoriale” and proceeded to decimate each other “en rivalités intestines où la violence le disputait à l'épouvante” (9). In response, the Saïfs, rulers of the fictional Empire of Nakem, make the extension of Islam the cover for wars of conquest whose real object is the harvesting of slaves. From the start, there is complicity in victimization. The Saïfs sustain themselves through their capacity to make war, which is ensured through the wealth generated by slaves, who are readily available because slavery is central to the political economy of the surrounding African states: “Afin d'entretenir—bon roi des rois nègres—ce faste avide de bruit et de terres nouvelles, Saïf intensifia, grâce à la complicité des chefs du Sud, la traite des esclaves, qu'il bénit en sanguinaire doucereux. Le Négre, n'ayant pas d'âme mais seulement des bras—contrairement à Dieu—dans une infernale jubilation du sacerdoce et du négoce, de l'intime et de la publicité, abattu, débité, stocké, marchandé, disputé, adjugé, vendu, fouetté, attaché et livré—avec un mépris attentif, studieux, souffrant—et aux Portugais et aux Espagnols et aux Arabes … et aux Français et aux Hollandais et aux Anglais …, fut jeté aux quatre vents” (17–18). Since the Africans “process” each other into “négraille,” they come to see themselves “avec un mépris attentif”: “Sous le coup de la nécessité, le père vendait son fils, le frère son frère …” (20). By the nineteenth century, “[u]n homme valide, robuste et fort, coûtait un peu plus qu'un chèvre” (25); so dependent is the economy upon slavery, that as abolition gains ground in the West, “la traite orientale” (25) and indigenous markets assume increasing importance.

For all its extravagance and gallows humor, Ouologuem's account rests upon historical fact.²⁴ However, the narrative focuses upon the moral and psychic cost of transforming others and being transformed into “négraille.” The price of power for the Saïfs and their collaborators is limitless treachery; if the capacity to exercise violence becomes the sole security, then aberrant sexuality becomes a source of ritualistic reassurance of one's power to transgress limits with impunity: “Au cours des saturnales, l'inceste est licite et même recommandé, conjugué d'actes tels que sacrifices humains suivis de rapports sexuels incestueux et de coït avec les animaux: comme si, Nègre, on eût dû véritablement—ya atrash!—n'être que sauvage” (27). While incest follows “logically” from a social-political order based upon brothers selling each other into slavery, sadism passes into masochism, self-exaltation into self-abasement, as the Saïfs and their retainers flee the precariousness of their lives in orgies that render them indistinguishable from “négraille,” that assimilate their conduct to the expectations of one regarding them “avec un mépris attentif.” In a similar way, the common people are transformed into “négraille” through rituals of violence that leave them with “une résignation essoufflée et muette,” a sense of “la vanité des vies humaines” (10). This violence takes the politically pedagogical form of shattering the fragile human structures that promise futurity (destroying villages, slaughtering children, disembowelling pregnant women), while forcing the slaves to chant “leur dévotion à la justice seigneuriale” (10). The Saïfs use the categorical, hierarchical structures of Islamic culture to impose a “slave mentality” upon the Africans, in which their voices must conform to the voices of their rulers, in which insistence upon “submission” engenders an intense masochism—an identification with the power that humiliates and dehumanizes. Indeed, the Saïfs' severing of natural ties, of earthly sources of significance and communal identity, may be seen as a savage parody of the Ibrahim myth: the Saïfs create a new “community” through replicating God's demand for unconditional obedience and absolute dependence. In doing so, the Saïfs are drawing upon a cultural tradition in which temporal power rests upon religious claims. Richard Roberts notes that when the Islamic Umarian army conquered the Middle Niger valley in the early 1860s, it justified its actions as a jihad: “For Muslims, the world is divided into two parts: the abode of Islam (dar el-Islam) and the abode of warfare (dar al-harb). This duality—Islam versus unbelief and war versus non-war—was deeply embedded in the thinking and justification of Islamic statecraft. The state was called into being to bring belief to areas where unbelief reigned” (89). Furthermore, while the three major divisions within Islam (Sunnite, Shi'ite, and Kharijite) disagree about the processes by which authority is transmitted, their disagreements presuppose that legitimate political power rests upon divine will, upon being Gods' appointed viceroy (khalifā); therefore, political power hinges upon maintaining a symbolic association between the divine and the human, the Prophet and the community (umma), the ruler and the governed.²⁵ Ouologuem suggests that masochistic identification with the ruler's sovereign will is “rewarded” by the cultivation of an equally intense sadism. Saïf El Haram secures power by “provoking” miracles: “un bûcher, par la complicité de la miséricorde divine, s'embrasa tout seul, sur lequel grillaient vifs dix-huit notables …” (16); the crowd, “à court d'extase, … entonnant un chant religieux, à genoux, mugit: ‘Au prodige!’ … Une fête national se trouvait ainsi instaurée” (17). The Empire expands because “[l]a capture des tribus rebelles, des hommes libres, … le sacrifice de leur chef …, devinrent des actes rituels, qui passèrent dans la coutume des frétillants négrillons, dont la barbarie répondit à l'attente de l'empereur et des notables …” (20). By the late nineteenth century, “cet effroyable chevauchement de coutumes, d'exactions, de razzias, de dilettantisme” is “encapsulé dans la vie dévote, féodale, terrienne, oisive et sensuelle de I'Islam …” (27). In Nakem, a political economy based upon slavery reproduces and is sustained by a psychic-moral economy based upon sado-masochism. The “genius” of the great Saïf ben Isaac El Héït, who rules throughout the first half of the twentieth century, lies in his ability to maintain both economies against the political and cultural “aggression” of French colonialism.

Since the French administration robs him of the ability to direct his populace's aggression outward in warfare, Saïf makes violence against women state policy, thus permitting men to relieve their self-hatred while engendering psychic or symbolic complicity in his own violence against his subjects: he orders the infibulation of all virgins and issues a law that “faisait définitivement de la femme l'outil des hommes. … Enfin, nombre d'hommes, vivant en concubinage avec le sexe faible, se trouvèrent heureux d'avoir à conquérir, à l'occasion du mariage, un plaisir nouveau, sadique, fait de volupté et de souffrance …” (62). Ouologuem makes brutal comedy of the potential for the Islamic principle of ontological hierarchy to license “pious” cruelty against women: “[u]ne femme adultère … était pour le moins mise nue, exposée en plein cour royale. … Dans certain cas … un autre supplice … ‘maintenait la femme cuisses ouvertes au-dessus d'un feu de bois, qui lui roussissait les poils du sexe'” (62). By linking sex with mastery, and mastery with violence, Saïf makes cruelty to women a temporary dispensation from the humiliations of colonialism and the powerlessness his own arbitrary rule imposes. Bouhdiba, Messini, and Combs-Schilling note that one response to Western colonialism was to “reinforce still more the tendency to closedness and sclerosis. Arab society was to set up structures of passive defence around zones rightly regarded as essential: the family, women, the home” (Bouhdiba 231)²⁶, since the colonial situation gave new urgency to the subordination of women, Saïf jealously guards his power to “license” masculine governance of the feminine. Learning that two of his slaves, Kassoumi and Tambira, have fallen in love, he asserts his authority over the conjugal bond. Taking the right of the first night, he seeks to subsume sex to violence: “Elle n'endura nulle souffrance à la grande colère de Saïf, qu'un strategème de la femme combla néanmoins: la mariée … avait placé sous elle un sachet empli de sang du mouton, qui s'exprima en éclaboussures que Saïf, sadique, crut avoir fait jaillir du tréfonds de la femme” (63).

Just as the hierarchical construction of sexuality in Islam ensures that erotic love in marriage will not threaten a man's devotion to God, so the inculcation of sado-masochistic forms of sexuality in his people ensures that marriage will not engender patterns of reciprocity and dialogue that would threaten the forms of social order through which Saïf rules; as with his predecessors, Saïf's power rests upon his capacity to reproduce within his African subjects a self-loathing that manifests itself in violence against fellow Africans. When the sorcerer Bouremi seeks to expose Saïf's treachery, he discovers that everyone chooses to regard him as mad; over-whelmed by his powerlessness, Bouremi explodes in homicidal violence against his wife (99). When the assassin Sankolo sees his fiancée Awa watching him masturbate as he watches, forlornly, Saïf's son and the German anthropologist Shrobénius' daughter make love, he experiences a humiliation he can only assuage by murder: “Sankolo abaissa les yeux vers elle. Il sut immédiatement que la femme l'exécrait” (107). Not only does Saïf's political order encourage violence against women as “compensation” for symbolic emasculation, it organizes a vast, illicit slave trade in supposedly “dead” people, who are transformed into zombies through a mixture of drugs and forcible promiscuity. The same Sankolo, escaped from slavery, tells the French governor of a world that is, in part, a parody of the Islamic paradise. Bouhdiba notes that “paradise is peopled with houris. These creatures are as feminine as can be imagined. … On their breasts is written the name of their husband. … Each man has seventy alcoves. … In each alcove are arranged seventy beds; on each bed is a woman awaiting the Chosen One, surrounded by a thousand negresses, each holding a bowl and feeding the woman and the husband. … One's appetite increases a hundredfold. … Man's sexual potency is also multiplied” (75). Sankolo describes enforced promiscuity as a complement to drugs in securing the slaves' acquiescence in their dehumanization; “Comprenez, comprenez, un Nègre, c'est zéro; une Négresse bonne à pourfendre. … Tu seras si bien drogué que tu ne pourras répondre, avec des allures de bête tu hurleras, tes yeux agrandis voudront des femmes, et les gens te fuiront. Tu n'auras plus en tête que deux mots: dabali-travail, travail-dabali. De temps en temps une putain te fera l'amour. Et puis … tu connais la fin: la folie …” (125). Every woman is vulnerable to masculine essays in sadism. When Tambira consults the sorcerer Dougouli about magic to help her sons in their examinations, he humiliates and then rapes her, reducing her to whimpering “comme un chien fidèle” (149); immediately thereafter, she is raped by two of Saïf's assassins so brutally that she either is killed or kills herself. Saïf even plays upon French susceptibility to sadistic sexuality to secure his position. When the governor, Chevalier, learns of his treachery, Saïf sends Awa to seduce him. Chevalier has his dogs strip Awa and participate in his “conquest”; she, in turn, passes on information to Saïf that leads to Chevalier's assassination.

Saïf's encouragement of a sado-masochistic psychic economy reinforces his power by usurping the position and parodying the forms of the Islamic God; at the same time, sado-masochism itself does violence to the basic assumptions of Islam. Lacan notes that Sade, a hundred years before Freud, dissociates the “principe du plaisir” from “sa fonction dans l'éthique traditionelle,” separating the “natural” pursuit of pleasure from the pursuit of the Good, of one's spiritual well-being (119). The unity of the real and the right (haqq) is severed. Pleasure becomes an autonomous, imperious demand that is experienced as an implacable Other: “Désirs … ici seuls à les lier, et exaltés d'y rendre manifeste que le désir, c'est le désir de l'Autre” (137). To the extent that one is compelled to acknowledge and follow “le désir de l'Autre,” one affirms a desacralized universe: “Sade fait glisser pour chacun d'une fracture imperceptible l'axe ancien de l'éthique: qui n'est rien d'autre que l'égoïsme du bonheur” (143). Hence, the sadism that Saïf cultivates is also a masochism not only in the sense of encouraging identification of one's pleasure with Saïf's exercise of power, but also in the sense of inflicting upon oneself through the “text” of another's broken body the lesson that there is no power but violence and no law but force and fraud: within such a metaphysical horizon, Saïf's mastery “makes sense.” Thus, as Maurice Bloch notes in a different context, “[T]he denigration of women serve[s] for the legitimacy of the state” (1989 136).²⁷

Ouologuem explores the possibility of escaping this replication of violence through the story of the Kassoumi family. The first time the narrative pauses to describe the internal life of one of Saïf's slaves, it portrays how Kassoumi is reminded, as he eats from a banana tree, of his lost home: “Et le pays, le pays lointain, peu à peu, l'envahissait, lui renvoyant, à travers la distance, ses formes, ses bruits, ses horizons connus, ses odeurs, et la saveur de la terre verte où courait la brise” (50). This first glimpse of the humanity of the Africans is complicated by its evocation of Marcel's discovery of involuntary memory in A la recherche du temps perdu: “toutes les fleurs de notre jardin et celles du parc de M. Swann et les nymphéas de la Vivonne, et les bonnes gens du village et leur petit logis et l'église et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé” (l. 47–48). Does the Proustian echo suggest the universality of humanity and hence the depth of horror involved in Saïf's gamesmanship, or does it suggest that Africans (including the implied author) are so thoroughly colonized, so fully processed into “négraille,” that they cannot imagine or give voice to their humanity except through assimilating European cultural patterns? Kassoumi's retrieval of memory, his imaginative recovery of his native “pays,” is immediately followed by his first encounter with Tambira, which leads to love, marriage, children, fidelity, and devotion that not even death can weaken. Ouologuem links the recovery of identity with the capacity to love in a way that may be illuminated by Dogon mythology. Just as the first two chapters may be read as a cosmogony, as the creation of a political-psychic “world,” and the third chapter as the replication of those “cosmic” patterns in individual human histories, so Kassoumi's and Tambira's courtship and marriage may be seen in terms of the Dogon belief that divine and human activities spring from love. Amma, the original god, creates two male twins, Ogo and Nommo, promising them feminine twins later. “Ogo fears that Amma … will deprive him of the feminine partner whom he needs to become a creator, and this fear leads him to struggle to posses his placenta, the matrix of creativity. … Even though Amma totally defeats Ogo, banishes him from the divine and human communities, and establishes his obedient twin as the founder and lord of humanity, Ogo's rebellion … determine[s] the shape of creation” (Pelton 168–169). Through his impatience to gain his feminine complement, Ogo forces Amma to depart from his original scheme of producing “four pairs of androgynous twins who could give birth to perfect beings like them-selves” (Pelton 172); he brings into being distinct masculine and feminine identities. However, in its separation into distinct genders, humanity senses its loss of “the primordial bliss of androgyny”; hence, males “experience their sexuality as the drive to rediscover a lost unity, to find that feminine half which life's beginnings promised them” (Pelton 191). From this erotic drive towards complementarity, towards the recovery of the “lost country,” fidelity to the “first memory,” comes the structuring of human communal and physical life upon the dialectics of a twinness that must be culturally achieved: “[M]an's aloneness is only a beginning. … Life in its fullness, as the celebration and renewal of the cosmos, only happens where twinness had not yet been fully realized, but must be sought. If there were not two … there could never be one or three” (Pelton 208). Clearly, the Dogon account of sexuality as the erotic pursuit of complementarity opposes Saïf's (and perhaps Islamic culture's) account of sexuality as the quest for mastery; to the extent that Kassoumi and Tambira follow its patterns, they constitute a genuine “counterforce” to Saïf's tyranny.

Rather like Samba, the Kassoumis' son, Raymond, is subjected to rival educations; the example of his parents is juxtaposed with the example Saïf makes of his parents: the murder of Tambira is followed by killing Raymond's siblings and selling his father into slavery. Like Samba, Raymond studies in Paris, where he replicates the patterns of the Saïfs and notables in relieving his sense of precariousness in an orgy of sensuality that includes (albeit unwittingly) incest. He discovers in the European world the same forms of sadism and violence deployed by Saïf. His homosexual lover cannot resist “un obscur besoin de représailles, plaisir de se venger, de blesser son Nègre” (181); after World War Two, he discovers his Strasbourg house destroyed “par l'occupant: Saïf, l'autre, le mauvais Blanc, boche” (187). After the war, Saïf and the notables cultivate Raymond as a candidate for the National Assembly, as their instrument to maintain power after colonialism, while he imagines that he can use his position against Saïf. However, the day before the election, he turns self-loathing against his white wife, brutally asserting his mastery through forcible oral sex: “il se vide de sa haine de la femme …” (192). Ouologuem suggests not only that Raymond has been ultimately conscripted into Saïf's service, that his psyche has been brutalized into homage to Saïf, making him just one of the “négraille,” a “fils de serf” (193), but also that the self-hatred Africans have so often turned against themselves is now free, in our time, to be turned equally against Europeans.

Were the novel to end at this point, it would be exceedingly bleak. But in the final chapter, “L'Aurore,” Saïf is confronted by a French Catholic bishop, Henry, who has been Raymond's lifelong mentor and has spent forty-five years in Nakem ministering to the “négraille” with such an extravagance of devotion that his life resembles a medieval saint's legend or the hagiography of a marabout. Geertz notes that marabouts are characterized by “extraordinary physical courage, absolute personal loyalty, ecstatic moral intensity, and the almost physical transmission of sanctity from one man to another” (1968, 33).²⁸ Henry combines a marabout's force of character with the selflessness of a desert saint. During World War One, “le doyen Henry—folie confuse du devoir d'amour, pauvrement beau comme le désespoir d'une âme chrétienne—était allé, bossu concerné par le drame nègre, de village en village, de case en case, prêtre ouvrier déjà, piochant la terre des paysans, prodiguant soins et médicaments, et, le soir venu, lisant la Vie des apôtres. … Il lava les pieds de ce petit peuple de déshérités, dont la peau, couverte de pustules écailleuses, était plus froide qu'un serpent, et rude comme une lime” (139–140; 142).²⁹

After Raymond brutalizes his wife, he goes to see Henry, who informs him that he has discovered how Saïf has trained snakes to carry out his assassinations. He also tells Raymond that the Chinese play a game of tying two birds to opposite ends of a long rope, then letting them fly until they tear each other apart as the rope snaps taut: “L'humanité est une volaille de ce genre. Nous sommes tous victimes de ce jeu; séparés, mais liés de force. Tous, sans exception” (194). In the climactic confrontation between them, Saïf tells Henry, “La loi de justice et d'amour est le seul lien profond qui puisse unir, par le haut, nos irréductibles diversités. Par le bas, s'agite … la soif de puissance et de gloire. Mais là est notre richesse et notre complément mutuel, là notre parenté véritable” (203). He proposes a hierarchical partition of the universe that would cede temporal power to a game of violence isolated from “la loi de justice et d'amour.” By revealing that he knows how Saïf uses snakes, that his lifetime of “folie confuse du devoir d'amour” has given him the power to beat Saïf at his own game, Henry insists that the “art de dialoguer avec la vie” (203) reveals the interconnectedness of right and might: “Le droit sans la force est caricature. La force sans le droit est misère” (206). While life is a game, it has “ses règles” (206), the first of which is the inescapable interconnectedness of humanity: “séparés, mais liés de force.” After Saïf, playing chess with Henry, pushes a cylinder containing an asp he had intended for the bishop into the fire, he declares, “Voilà des générations que le Nakem est né, et depuis quinze minutes seulement, l'on sait entretenir de sa santé” (206).

In suggesting that the one possibility of replacing the replication of violence with the “art de dialoguer avec la vie,” with learning to “entretenir” about the nation's health, requires “checkmating” the absolutism of force with the absolutism of love, Ouologuem follows the implications of Dogon mythology, that a sustainable human community is built from the dynamic, tense interplay of oppositional forces, which are linked in a game that has as its first and inescapable rule the law of love: the life-force of humans and the cosmos strive for completion in the complementarity of dualities. Therefore, violence against others breeds and depends upon a sadistic delight in one's own suffering: “Nos yeux boivent l'éclat de soleil, et, vaincus, s'étonnent de pleurer” (9). While Le Devoir de violence leaves the reader with uncertainty whether the sadomasochistic political economy will not be reborn “sous les cendres chaudes de plus de trente Républiques africaines …” (207), it does conclude with an image of balance and complementarity that suggests, in contrast to L'aventure ambiguë, that nature should not be subordinated to a reason bound to a single authoritative voice, but instead that the hope for human community lies in emulating the processes of reciprocity, forgiveness, and longing for intercourse through which the elements of the physical world bring forth new life: “mais à cette heure où le regard au Nakem vole autour des souvenirs, la brousse comme la côte était fertile et brûlante de pitié. Dans l'air, l'eau et le feu, aussi, la terre des hommes fit n'y avoir qu'un jeu …” (208).

Notes

1. For discussions of the plurality of values and perspectives in Achebe's presentation of traditional Igbo culture, see Innes 1990; Ngara 1985 and 1982; Jan-Mohamed 1983, esp. 151–184; Carroll 1980; Cook 1977, esp. 65–94; Taiwo 1976. For Achebe's own account of Igbo polytheism and pluralism, see Achebe 1989, esp. 47–67, 91–99, 126–170. For recent discussions of the need to address the role of African pre-colonial cultural traditions, especially myth and religion, in criticism of African fiction, see Miller 1990, esp. 1–67; Lazarus 1990; Gates 1988; Lee 1984; Okpewho 1983; Chinweizu, et al. 1983.

2. For discussions of the relationship between polytheism, polyvocality, and polyvalency in African philosophy, see Mudimbe 1988; Gyekye 1987; Pelton 1980. For accounts of dialogic discourse, see Bakhtin 1986, 1984, 1981. For a consideration of Bakhtin's debt to the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of suspicion towards the “hegemonic” tendencies of Western theoretical discourse, see Morson and Emerson 1990, 1989; Morson 1991. For a related account of the responsiveness of novelistic discourse to complex, heterogeneous particularity, see Nussbaum 1990.

3. The Quran offers abundant grounds for this belief. See, for example, 2: 1–3, 9, 14–15; 3:18–19, 194–199; 5:57–77; 30: 11–60. In all these passages, rhetorical reliance upon sharp antithesis and categorical assertion draws a firm line between inside and outside: “And when they meet those who believe, they say, We believe; and when they are alone with their devils, they say, Surely we are with you, we were only mocking. Allah will pay them back their mockery, and He leaves them alone in their inordinacy, blindly wandering on” (2:24–25); “Surely the (true) religion with Allah is Islam. And those who were given the Book differed only after knowledge had come to them, out of envy among themselves. And whoever disbelieves in the messages of Allah—Allah indeed is Quick at reckoning” (3: 18–19).

4. On the role of ritual in shaping cultural identity and legitimating political order, see Combs-Schilling 1989; Bloch 1989, 1986; Comaroff 1985; Bourdieu 1990, 1977; Geertz 1973, esp. 87–189.

5. See Combs-Schilling 1989, esp. 49–76, 188–244, 255–271; Mernissi 1987, esp. 27–64, 108–120; Bouhdiba 1985, esp. 19–42, 212–249.

6. See John 3:4–21; Romans 5–8; Brown 1988, esp. 5–64, 428–447; Bhagavad-Gita, esp. 2:55–72, 4:18–24; The Dhammapada, “The Fire Sermon”; Combs-Schilling 1989: 95; Mernissi 1987: 31, 39, 41–42, 53–54.

7. See Gyekye 1987; Pelton 1980, esp. 1–70; Rattray 1930.

8. For an account of the interplay in Quranic texts between the sexual and the sacred, the masculine and the feminine, see Bouhdiba 1985: 7–18, 72–100.

9. See Charles Taylor's account of how modern Western conceptions of reality and selfhood were shaped by applying the methodology of the New Science to the task of moral and political philosophy (Taylor 1989: 1–107). Also see MacIntyre 1988, 1984, and Williams 1985.

10. See Geertz 1983: 188–189.

11. See Combs-Schilling 1989; Naaname-Guessous 1987; Mernissi 1987; Bouhdiba 1985; Sabbah 1984; Musallam 1983.

12. By contrast, Aristotle subsumes a man's relationship with his wife, albeit obliquely, under the category of friendship (NE 8: 1162^a 15–35); the implications of linking marriage and friendship (philia) are pursued by Plutarch in Coniugalia praecepta (Moralia II: 298–343) and Amatorius (Moralia IX: 306–441). For accounts of the intersection of ethics and love in marriage at the moment that the classical and the Christian traditions merge, see Brown 1988: 5–64; Foucault 1986: 72–80, 150–185; Kristeva 1987: 103–136. For the patristic critique of sexuality even within marriage, see Brown 1988; St. Jerome, On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Mary Against Helvidius (The Fathers of the Church 53: 11–43); St. Augustine, The Good Marriage and Against Julian (The Fathers of the Church 27: 9–51; 35). Mernissi notes in the Islamic tradition a suspicion of sexual love similar to that inscribed in patristic literature: even in marriage, women tempt men with fitna: “The conjugal unit presents an even graver danger than ephemeral sexual embrace: erotic love has the potential to grow into something much more encompassing, much more total. … The conjugal unit is a real danger and is consequently weakened by two legal devices, polygamy and repudiation” (114–115).

13. See Jaeger 1945, esp. 1:3–184, 298–331; Havelock 1963; Putnam 1965, esp. 64–104; MacIntyre 1984: 121–145; Brown 1984: 23–37.

14. See Lapidus 1984: 45; Sherif 1975: 33, 65–76, 105–158; Chittick 1989, esp. 145–170, 212–231.

15. Quranic hermeneutics has traditionally been divided between tafsīr bi'l-ray (interpretation by reason or private judgment) and tafsīr bi'l-ma'thūr (interpretation according to “what has been handed down” in the hadīth (the stories about the Prophet and his companions), R. Marston Speight notes that “Bi'l-ma'thūr covers the same range of meaning as ilm, but it is a less dynamic expression of the latter” (66). For a discussion of the centrality of doxa to the pre-Socratic thought, see Vickers 1988; for Aristotle's linking of the conception of “communal opinion” to the philosopher's task of accounting for “appearances,” see Nussbaum 1986, esp. 240–317.

16. See Nussbaum 1986: 1–84, 240–394; 1990: 54–105. The fate of “practical wisdom” (phronêsis, prudentia) in the West betrays a vexed relationship between the right and the real that derives from the twin sources of Greek polytheistic conceptions of reality divided pluralistically, potentially tragically, between diverse sources of power and value and the intense otherworldliness of early Christianity. On the one hand, there is the Ciceronian tradition of linking doing well and doing right in prudentia (see De Officiis I:xliii-xliv, III; Blumenberg 1987a: 430; Blumenberg 1987b: 204–206); on the other hand, there is a tradition of emphasizing the incommensurability of “worldly wisdom” and “true reality” from Boethius' separation of philosophy from fortune (The Consolation of Philosophy, Books II, IV) to Dante's account of Fortuna's arbitrary rule over worldly splendor and empty goods (“li splendor mondani,” “li ben vani”) in Inferno VII: 73–96 to Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms.

17. The interpretation of individual hadīths, their relation to Quranic exegesis, the role of example (sunna) in ethical education, the relation of law and mysticism constitute some of the sources of intellectual controversy out of which various “schools” emerged. See Rippen 1988 and Lapidus 1984. Much like Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles, Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers establishes what Paul Tillich calls “the theological circle” (1968 I:11–14) within which debate may occur.

18. Also see Miller 1985; Erickson 1979: 189–201; Soyinka 1976: 79–85.

19. See Blumenberg 1983, esp. 125–226, 343–434.

20. See Sherif 1975: 105–158; Lapidus 1984: 38–61; Leaman 1988; Chittick 1989, esp. 255–274.

21. See Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, esp. 213–226.

22. On the breadth of “borrowings” in Le Devoir de violence, see Miller 1985; Erickson 1979: 225–229; Soyinka 1976: 98–100.

23. The term is coined in Booth 1974.

24. See Roberts 1987, esp. 21–75; 84–100; 113–134.

25. For the Quranic roots of the theory of the khalifā, see Kister, in Rippen 1988, esp. 84–86. For a discussion of political authority in Islam, see Dabashi 1989 and Esposito 1984. For the history of Islamic expansion in Africa, see Roberts 1987: 76–134 and Trimingham 1968. For the role of symbolic identification in instituting and reproducing political authority, see Combs-Schilling 1989: 157–174, 188–205; Geertz 1968.

26. See Combs-Schilling 1989: 255–309; Mernissi 1987: vii-xxix, 165–177; Bouhdiba 1985: 231–249.

27. For examples of the interconnection between the ritualistic subordination of women and the legitimation of a male-dominated political order in Madagascar and Morocco respectively, see Bloch 1989, 1986, and Combs-Schilling 1989.

28. Also see Geertz 1968: 43–54.

29. For an account of the desert saints, see Brown 1988: 210–338.

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