[In the following essay, Sellin gives details concerning the accusations of plagiarism against Ouologuem for Le Devoir de violence and the aftereffects of these charges.]

“Un témoignage et une voix inconnus.”

(Le Monde)

In 1968 Editions du Seuil, which has over the years published an impressive list of works in French by African and Maghrebine authors, brought out a first novel, Le Devoir de violence, by Yambo Ouologuem.¹ Ouologuem was born in Mali in 1940 and is reportedly descended from the kings of the ancient Mali Empire. He went to Paris in the early 1960s to study at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and took degrees in literature, philosophy, and English.

I shall not attempt to summarize Le Devoir de violence in any detail.² Through historical flashbacks and accounts of the modern adventures of the family of protagonist Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, the book recounts the chronicle of an area of central West Africa, the fictitious kingdom of Nakem (perhaps an anagram of Kanem), from about 1200 to modern times. Written in a checkerboard of styles, and consisting of a sequence of violent acts, erotic deeds, and unexpected turns of events, Le Devoir de violence provides engrossing reading. Not surprisingly, the translation rights to this novel with its sure-fire formula of sex and violence were snapped up at the Frankfurt Book Fair by leading publishers in Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United States.³ The British and American publishers' plans included a large distribution in paperback. When the novel was awarded a coveted literary prize, its success story seemed to be an author's dream come true. At the time, no one knew that it was soon to turn into a nightmare for publisher and author alike.

Up till now, my publications regarding Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence have told the story of my elation and subsequent deflation at encountering this fascinating work and then seeing its presumed authenticity eroded by a number of discoveries of literary dependency. In this essay I should like to summarize the scandal in which I and others became involved; but I should also like to develop some thoughts on the relative attitudes in Africa and Europe regarding imitation and plagiarism. I shall no doubt fail to be definitive in both areas since in the first one we find ourselves brought down to the impasse of a writer's word against his publisher's and, in the second, we are bound to the use of speculation and generalization.

In the August 24, 1968 number of its biweekly literary supplement, Le Monde carried the following brief announcement in its regular “Vient de paraître” column:

Yambo Ouologuem. Le Devoir de violence. This half-historical, half-fictional novel about the penetration of the Whites into Africa, viewed from the African side, is the first work of a young Malian, accepted as a candidate in the Ecole Normale Supérieure, who has his licence in literature and in philosophy. An unknown voice and testimony.

(Le Seuil, 207 p., 15 F.)⁴

Most of the books thus launched have few repercussions and no one could predict the enormous success this book was about to enjoy, nor the subsequent critical and ethical storm which was to sweep it off the store shelves.

As the weeks and months passed, Le Devoir de violence met with unqualified enthusiasm from most reviewers, and its fame—and ultimately its notoriety—was assured when the judges of the Prix Renaudot awarded it the Prize in the first week of October. On October 12, the literary supplement of Le Monde printed two brief articles dealing with Ouologuem's book. Critics were later to react viscerally to what they considered a betrayal, and the intensity of their reaction may be explained in part by the converse intensity of the initial enthusiasm, typified by these reviews. When we now consider the compositional methods utilized by Ouologuem in writing Le Devoir de violence and which he openly advocates in an essay in his Lettre à la France nègre, the retrospective perusal of the first critical acclaim becomes ironic, almost comic. But I do not feel that we have experienced a response growing out of hurt pride, such as the reaction which drove critics to destroy Thomas Chatterton and van Meegeren after their respective forgeries had become known. In the case of Le Devoir de violence, we are not dealing with a forgery à la Brother Rowley or à la Vermeer but with a reliance on other writers' imaginative powers and a mechanical creative process which the author and the book itself (including the cover “blurb”) had at first led critics to take for a genuine impulse emanating from an individual talent and lending expression to the historico-ethnic heartbeat of a misunderstood continent. It is all well and good to eschew critical standards as outmoded devices and to maintain that art is solely in the eye of the beholder, but the fact remains that a number of critics had felt that Ouologuem had enriched literature, not merely exploited or perpetuated it.

The two articles in Le Monde are representative of the critical reaction which greeted this first novel, especially in Europe and America. The reviews stress Ouologuem's unique and independent imagination and the authenticity of his rôle as a mouthpiece for the African ontology. In the first of the two Le Monde pieces on Le Devoir de violence, Matthieu Galey praises Ouologuem for the way in which he has dug deeply into his past to lend strength to his characters:

The principal merit of the first book by Yambo Ouologuem, born in Mali twenty-eight years ago, is the fact that it is a novel, a real novel. Surely, he, too, devotes some thirty pages in the beginning of his work to the evocation of a distant Nakem empire which must be the novelistic transposition of an historical reality. But this harkening back to legend, through the vehicle of his ancestors, introduces the most astonishing, or rather one of the most astonishing characters of Le Devoir de violence: Saïf ben Isaac El Heït.⁵

In the second article in Le Monde, Philippe Decraene spoke for most readers when he extolled the powerful rhetoric, the individuality the freshness of material, and the authentic “Africanness” of Ouologuem's work. There is a certain unwitting humor in these early reviews, for—shades of Cocteau's belovèd use of accidental truths in the rhetoric of La Machine infernale and in the final sentences of Thomas l'imposteur⁶—the apprised reader recognizes that Ouologuem did, indeed, “borrow” or “assume” the “most direct means” in telling his tale. Decraene presumably did not know the precise nature of the means at the time that he praised Ouologuem's rhetoric in the following terms: “Abhorring rhetorical devices, rebelling against every compromise, he always adopts the path which appears to him most direct.”⁷ Decraene admired—and which reader would not?—the way in which the young writer's vision apparently sprang from the profound reservoir of African tradition: “Six years living in France, long months of teaching at the Charenton lycée and at the little seminary at Conflans, the preparation of a Diplôme d'Etudes Supérieures in English—successfully completed—followed by preparation for the Agrégation de Lettres, have in no way altered the authentically African view of things which he has retained.” (Ibid.) Decraene again is unwittingly ironic when he states that “For Ouologuem, ‘decolonization has not yet been achieved.’ That is the main reason he refuses to consider himself in the same light as other Malian authors” (Ibid.). According to Decraene, four years of work on Le Devoir de violence had left Ouologuem undaunted, the Malian having just completed a “Lettre ouverte à la France négre” for which he was seeking a publisher.

Critics throughout the world expressed a similar reaction to Le Devoir de violence. The only reservations came from some Africans who felt that the novel didn't ring true, but did not state why. Some felt that there were certain things a real African simply would not say; others wished to discredit Ouologuem for having laid a portion of the blame for the slave trade at the doorstep of conniving Black chieftains. Typical of this dismay is the reaction of the Zaïrese critic Mbelolo ya Mpiku who categorically states that “Ouologuem's vision stands in contradiction with the African reality.”⁸ His uneasiness becomes quite personal by the end of his article when he rejects Ouologuem's assessment of Black history: “However, no African critic who loves his people and is proud of them can agree with Ouologuem's view that the Black man's predicament today is the result of an ontological flaw, an innate collective proclivity to slavery and spoliation, or an inveterate inability to work out adequate solutions for his own problems” (Ibid., 145).

When Bound to Violence appeared in its American edition, Time and Newsweek both gave it considerable coverage and praise. Nor can I claim immunity. Several passages of a brief comment published in the French Review bear witness to my initial enthusiasm for the book and give an inkling, by contrast, of how disappointed I was to become when it later became evident that Ouologuem was not all that I had thought him to be:

These general characteristics and the rich and intricate history of West Africa from 1200 to today form the backdrop to, and at times the very stuff of, Yambo Ouologuem's brilliant first novel, Le Devoir de violence. The author makes exciting and enlightening use of the splendor of the ancient empires and the subsequent sweep of history without his work degenerating into florid exoticism.⁹

I glibly attributed irregularities of structure and style to a willed disruption of narrative in the tradition of the noveau roman and went on to stress the rôle Ouologuem's unique vision played in this creation: “Ouologuem tempers his naturally effusive prose with (1) strangely effective moments of crudity and brutality (2), digressions in a flat, controlled style, and (3) an intentional fragmentation of structure which, in keeping with the rationale of the nouveau roman, constantly reminds us that we are dealing with a fiction, an extension of the mind, the will, and the typewriter of a creator.” (Ibid.) Upon rereading this review, I am struck by the emphasis on expressions and words like “strangely effective,” “controlled,” “intentional,” “extension of the mind,” and “creator.” As though this were not ironic enough, I concluded my review on the following hopeful note:

The first offering by this young writer (born in Mali in 1940) greatly enriches Francophone African literature and is well-deserving of its receipt of the Prix Renaudot. I shall eagerly await further works by this man.

(Ibid.)

There are reports that Ouologuem has written at least one other novel under a pseudonym, but it was, as a matter of fact, the wished-for next book published under Ouologuem's own name which began to cause many critics to have some nagging doubts, not because of the contents per se but because of its flimsiness of diction and weakness of structure. One critic, not yet aware of the full importance of foreign sources in the composition of Le Devoir de violence, put it bluntly but accurately when he exclaimed that “Disappointment came, however, when Ouologuem published his second book, Lettre à la France nègre, a pamphlet in every way inferior to his novel” (Mpiku, 124). The only way, in fact, that it is superior to Le Devoir de violence is in its authenticity, for there is no reason to think that this work is not fully the product of Ouologuem's own talents and abilities! Critics found it difficult to reconcile the novel and the book of essays. The discrepancy was disappointing, and it was so great that it could not simply be attributed to the “sophomore jinx” which has temporarily blighted many a career. A year or so after the publication of Ouologuem's first novel, disquieting charges of borrowings, extensive imitation, and outright plagiarism began to circulate as rumors and then in a series of articles which in turn drew two reactions: on the one hand, a number of people wrote to the authors and editors of these articles supplying further examples of stylistic indebtedness; and, on the other, some critics sought to minimize the significance of plagiarism in general and to defend Ouologuem in particular.

At the “Colloque sur les littératures canadienne et africaine d'expression française” held at the University of Vermont in June, 1971, I demonstrated the similarity between certain passages in André Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des Justes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959), and Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence. There were audible gasps from the audience. Afterwards, one young African who contributed a good bit to the conference as a conspicuous Devil's advocate at a number of the sessions complained: “Why are you White people and Europeans always doing this to us? Whenever we come up with something good in Africa, you say that we couldn't have done it by ourselves.” The fact is, many authentic good things have come out of Africa and this novel appeared to be one of the finest, whence my great disappointment. Subsequent research and correspondence has revealed that some people were aware of the similarity to Schwarz-Bart's novel even when Le Devoir de violence was in manuscript. According to Paul Flamand, the publisher of Editions du Seuil, the manuscript of Le Devoir de violence was received just like any other unsolicited manuscript and turned over to an editor, François-Régis Bastide, who noticed similarities to the general structure of Le Dernier des Justes but did not realize how closely certain passages resemble the earlier work until after publication when the resemblance was noticed by the Schwarz-Bart editor at Seuil. Schwarz-Bart was immediately contacted and he reassured the publishers that he was not in the least offended but rather flattered by the use to which his work had been put by Ouologuem:

The use made of Le Dernier des Justes in no way annoys me … I have always thought of my books as apple-trees, pleased when someone eats some of my apples, and pleased if one is now and then picked in order to be planted in a different soil. I am especially touched, even overwhelmed, to think that a Black writer should have relied on Le Dernier des Justes in creating a book like Le Devoir de violence. Thus Mr Ouologuem is not indebted to me, but rather I to him.¹⁰

Nor did M. Flamand and his staff at Editions du Seuil have knowledge of the other more direct borrowings which later came to light: “It was only after publication that Ouologuem published at Nalis his Lettre à la France nègre and that he sent it to us … But how could we have suspected, in the manuscript, those ‘borrowings’ which the author made, almost verbatim, from other works?”¹¹

Any young writer has been influenced by other writers and will attempt to emulate what he admires, either consciously or unconsciously. He will, as in the case of such fine writers as Christopher Okigbo, John Pepper Clark, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and others, write “in the style of” Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Perse, Claudel, or someone else, without his effort being anything more than apprenticeship derivation or the result of a spontaneous kinship. Certain reviewers seemed to sense such echoes of other literatures in Le Devoir de violence; and perhaps one might assume their existence in a first novel. My very first reaction upon completing Le Devoir de violence was a fleeting thought that perhaps its author had been impressed by Kateb Yacine's amazing novel, Nedjma (Seuil, 1956), and had wanted to do something along those lines for the Black African novel. Rather than condemn him for this, I admired him for apparently having the vision to undertake a similar blend of the “retour aux sources” and the culture shock inherent in the vicissitudes of rapidly marching modern history. Such “remous” or echoes of foreign literatures reached other critics, as well. Consider, for example, the comment of Yves Benot:

The book is a veritable anthology. An anthology of styles, too, and a cursory reading brings to the reader's nostrils the intermingled smells of Kateb Yacine, Sartre, Gatti, even Godard (the dialogue of the prostitute with Brice Parain), not to mention the distorted echo of the “négraille” of Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, and probably many others, as well. As a result of this, the novel takes on a certain stylistique pomp which easily amazes and charms the reader. In this respect, the book is a greenhouse product, resolutely artificial (the story Sankolo tells of his experience of being drugged and sold as a zombie, pp. 114–25, is a virtuoso piece owing a lot, it seems to me, to Paris and very little to Africa).

(Op. cit., 130)

It is astonishing how loath people were to criticize this novel on the grounds of its having lifted some of its material out of the works of other writers. It may be that they hesitated to make accusations which could be considered libelous.¹² Even half a dozen years after numerous articles in Le Canard Enchaîné,¹³Le Figaro, The International Herald, Times Literary Supplement, West Africa, Transition, Research in African Literatures, and on Page One of the daily Times of London had broadcast the news of the borrowings, the scandal of Ouologuem's prize-winning novel has not become widely known. Most critics and even many area specialists remain impervious to the shadow cast on the book's authenticity. In a recent monograph entitled Cultura negro africana moderna, Alfredo Riedel appears to be unaware of the whole affair, writing as follows:

Ouologuem's work, which is of extraordinary impact, is the product above all of a need for sincerity and pride and of the necessity to know integrally his own personality without false emotions or lies.¹⁴

The two most conclusive demonstrations of derivations of any significant length—and I have had personal or published reports of passages of one or several lines reminiscent of Pascal, de Maupassant, and many others—came before the public eye within several months of each other.¹⁵ In the Fall, 1971 issue of Research in African Literatures, I summarized the similarities between Ouologuem and Schwarz-Bart which had induced such a response at the Vermont colloquium. In that article, I present several passages which are astonishingly similar, in which Ouologuem has paralleled, substituted for, and generally orchestrated on the rhetoric of several sections of Le Dernier des Justes. To give but one example, Schwarz-Bart's novel opens as follows:

Nos yeux reçoivent la lumière d'étoiles mortes. Une biographie de mon ami Ernie tiendrait aisément dans le deuxième quart du XXe siècle; mais la véritable historie d'Ernie Lévy commence très tôt, vers l'an mille de notre ère, dans la vieille cité anglicane de York. Plus précisément: le 11 mars 1185.

With the substitution of the Blacks for the Jews, with some variations such as “sun” for “stars,” and with some assonantal and consonantal play of the sort practiced by Raymond Roussel (such as replacing “reçoivent” by “boivent”), Ouologuem comes as close to using as his own the words of Schwarz-Bart as one can come without overtly plagiarizing:

Nos yeux boivent l'éclat du soleil, et, vaincus, s'étonnent de pleurer. Maschallah! 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, dans l'Empire africain de Nakem, au sud du Fezzan, bien après les conquêtes d'Okba ben Nafi el Fitri.¹⁶

In my article I did not accuse Ouologuem of plagiarism, for in the passages cited he has not truly plagiarized. He has borrowed and adapted some Schwarz-Bart and added a dash of Aimé Césaire, who had referred in his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal to the “Black men who have invented nothing.” In fact, when the same diligent young man at the Vermont colloquium asked from the floor if I were accusing Ouologuem of plagiarism, I replied that I was not, that I was rather accusing him of hypocrisy and literary mauvaise foi in light of his frequent public statements proclaiming the authentic Africanness of his book. Despite this disclaimer and the fact that the word “plagiarism” does not appear in either my Vermont text nor my RAL essay, I have been rebuked by several critics for having levelled plagiarism charges at a work which they contend really only imaginatively assimilates and exploits European models in a form of reverse cultural imperialism.

My brief piece published in RAL would probably not have attracted a great deal of attention here or abroad had it not been for the fact that the Times Literary Supplement and daily Times (London) mentioned it on May 5, 1972, on which date TLS published side by side a passage from Le Devoir de violence and a section of a 1934 novel by Graham Greene, entitled It's a Battlefield. The characters in the passage by Ouologuem bear different names and a few slight changes have been entered, but the lengthy passage from Le Devoir de violence is little more than a translation of the Greene text, sufficiently faithful that the indebtedness was recognizable even after retranslation into English by Ralph Manheim.¹⁷ It seems to me that this does constitute plagiarism by translation, if, indeed, Ouologuem did not make use of the existing French translation published by Fayard. What's more, this discovery of a second large passage lifted from another work gave credence to growing suspicions among critics that there might be many borrowed passages quilted together to make up the bulk of this novel. Robert McDonald, writing about the Greene borrowing in Transition, expressed suspicion about the book in general and about several other specific passages which he felt did not ring true:

In regard to doubts and suspicions I am unable to substantiate any other definite charges, but there are certainly at least two other important sections of the book about which I feel distinctly wary. The first of these is the section from page 150 to page 159, describing the homosexual affair between Kassoumi and the Frenchman Lambert (…) My suspicion, then, is that the homosexual episode could very easily have been taken from one of the numerous mediocre gay novels that have flooded the American market, especially, in recent years.

The other passage that I feel particularly doubtful about is that from page 161 to page 163 in which Kassoumi's experiences in the Second World War are described. Again, there is nothing that particularly ties it to the character involved, and so one feels that it could have been taken from any one of dozens of post-war novels.¹⁸

Many critics have expressed confusion about the lack of relevance of certain sections. One section, for example, which is so incredible it should jolt any reader is the visit to the brothel where the protagonist discovers that the girl with whom he has just had relations is his own sister! The incident would fit in better in a traditional “sous le manteau” pornographic novel of the sort with which Paris abounds. There is a major shift in tone in the novel as historical chronicle gives way to the adventures of the contemporary protagonist, and I suspect that this partial collapse of Le Devoir de violence is the result of reliance on inferior material. In dealing with the historical phase of his narration, Ouologuem presumably consulted literary, historical, and archival works which were better written and/or more factual than some of the recent materials which time and good taste have not yet eliminated from the scene.

After the TLS revelation, letters flew back and forth among critics and publishers, and the item was sufficiently newsworthy to be picked up by several other important dailies, including the Paris Herald and Le Figaro. The latter published in its weekly literary supplement of May 13 a brief item by Guy Le Clec'h summarizing the TLS allegations.

The only defense Yambo Ouologuem has offered, save indirectly as through remarks quoted by critics, is a reply to Le Clec'h published in the Figaro Littéraire of June 10, 1972. Boxed in under the heading “Polémique” are three items entitled “Le Devoir de violence” (Yambo Ouologuem), “Le Devoir de vérité” (signed B. P.), and “Le Devoir d'exactitude” (Marie Schébéko). These consist respectively of Ouologuem's reply, a rebuttal in behalf of Le Figaro, and a statement by the agent representing Greene in France.

Ouologuem's remarks seem somewhat confused, even illogical, and were—I presume—composed in a state of stress. Their major contentions are 1) that use was made of work by Greene and others in order to provide the novel with several “contradictory voices” and in order that Ouologuem's African brothers not think that he would discredit them; and 2) that, to this end, he had placed quotation marks around the passages in his manuscript:

Because of the explosive nature of the subject matter of my novel, Le Devoir de violence (torture scenes, cannibalism, insanity, legendary and historical facts, with a few winks at the thesis-stories [“récit à clés”], at racial confrontations), to be objective required that I cause to be heard, as needed, several contradictory voices reflecting the very image of the contradictory things, the prejudices, superstitions, and sensitivities inherent in the problems besetting Blacks.

Thus, the passage by Mr Graham Greene accused as plagiarism—but in fact cited in quotation marks (just as was the case with several lines from Schwarz-Bart) in my manuscript which is in the hands of my lawyer—preceded a mad scene in which a White man, disguised as the administrator Chevalier, couples a Black woman with a dog. I am a Black man. Obviously, if the facts evoked by me had been the fruit of my imagination, my brothers in race would scarcely have forgiven me for having sullied the Blacks.¹⁹

Ouologuem further contends that he never attempted to disguise this technique but spoke openly of it in various lectures and interviews, particularly in the United States, but those he mentions and which I have seen make no reference appearing to be more than a young author's intellectual “puffing” or attempts to expand the artistic scope and theoretical impact of his work:

Under these circumstances, putting the text of Mr Greene between quotation marks was not to act as a plagiarizer but to prevent myself from being disowned by my people as a result of considering it a literary transposition of a fact of a judicial nature. The references to Graham Greene, Kipling, and others were given openly by me to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and others, during lectures both to professors and to various Black Studies Programs. “If Graham Greene had been present at the scene, here's how he might have described it.”

(Ibid.)

Ouologuem closes his defense with a rather lame assumption of readers' reactions and a parting ad hominem salvo directed at his erstwhile publisher:

The basic questions which I ask by means of these techniques and which was noticed by every intelligent reader or critic, and a fortiori by the members of the Renaudot jury, who are hardly illiterate, is as follows: “In a world of violence in which the ‘devoir d'amour’ or vocation of love has been relegated to the realm of lies, who will help the Black to get out of the straits in which he finds himself?” Certainly not the publisher of Le Devoir de violence with whom I am at odds and to whom I refused to give my second novel.

It is less than glorious to think that we are presently engaged in a discussion involving accounts. It is not Yambo Ouologuem who has borrowed from the rich, it is the rich who have borrowed from Yambo Ouologuem by making him assume, contrary to editorial practice, the material burden of the customary thanks tendered the members of the Renaudot jury. And it is significant that this publisher should plead guilty in my name without even questioning me, and that, without the slightest claim by Mr Graham Greene, he should withdraw my book from sale throughout the entire world.

(Ibid.)

The two other inserts respond to Ouologuem's final statement. They both indicate that Greene was very upset and demanded that the book be withdrawn until that portion in question could be excised or rewritten:

To write that Graham Greene made no claim is false. It was the request of the great British novelist that Mme Schébéko, the director of the Clairouin agency which represents Greene in France, made contact with Paul Flamand, the director of Editions du Seuil, who in turn sent a letter of apology to Graham Greene and then took the steps he had to take in keeping with law and common sense …

(B. P., Ibid.)

Ouologuem implies, then, that someone at Editions du Seuil removed the quotation marks. This would be a very foolhardy gesture which it is difficult to imagine a reputable publisher perpetrating. Furthermore, as I have already pointed out, M. Paul Flamand denies that Seuil had any prior knowledge of the many alleged sources. One critic, who interviewed Ouologuem in the latter's Paris apartment, found the author resentful over the recent allegations:

When I saw Yambo in his Paris flat recently he was much pre-occupied by the new attacks, and was talking somberly in terms of conspiracy. He was in particular very caustic about the whole relationship of white literary circles, especially publishers, with black writers.²⁰

There ensues, in this interesting article, a passage I consider to be of the utmost significance and therefore worth quoting at length. (I do not know if the manuscript mentioned by Ouologuem is the same one allegedly left with his lawyer or an early one whence he copied his final version. It would be interesting to know how many drafts there were; I suspect there was the primitive one mentioned below and then the copy submitted to the publishers. Given the compositional technique there would be little need for an intermediary draft. Even if there are quotation marks on Ouologuem's copy of the typescript, these could have been entered after the fact and one really would have to examine the original publishers' copy to corroborate or invalidate Ouologuem's claim.):

To demonstrate the injustice of the charges against him, he spent some time taking me through his original handwritten manuscript (in an old exercise book) of Le Devoir de violence showing me all the places where there had been quotation marks, if not actual mentions of his literary allusions and quotations. He gave me a fairly comprehensive run-down on all the other authors he might be accused of plagiarising, including the 16th century Portuguese explorer Lope di Pigafeta, and a modern detective story by John Macdonald (the basis of the sequence containing the asp killing), as well as traditional epic sources in Arabic, Bambara and Amharic, and even French colonial documents that he says are still in secret archives. I saw, for instance, where he had written “here ends The Last of the Just,” a reference omitted like so many others, for whatever reason, from the published version. But it is, in truth, a fairly chaotic script, much erased and amended, with a multitude of little pieces of paper inserted and clipped onto pages, some of which have been lost. And it only demonstrates what is completely apparent anyway, that the so-called plagiarism is a stylistic technique to further the purposes of the novel.

Yambo compares it to the techniques of what is called the new novel, or even the work of some modern film-makers in which clips from the films of others are inserted. In a collage it is the arrangement and the juxtaposition which are important.

(Ibid.)

The description of the original manuscript proves that Le Devoir de violence was not a composition in which inadvertant recollections of school-day readings spontaneously returned to the pen of the brilliant young man, but rather a contrived patchwork intentionally—although apparently messily—put together from various materials. If Ouologuem did not prove his own innocence by revealing this manuscript to “K. W.”—for it is just as possible that the quotation marks and references were omitted in the preparation of the final draft prior to submission as omitted by the editors after receipt of such a manuscript—he did prove at least one thing: that he was aware that he was using the material he inserted into his text. It is this factor which distinguishes his text from works done spontaneously in the style of an admired author, such as the many poems by Africans at a certain period in the fifties and sixties which seemed to bear the influence of Jacques Prévert and Paul Eluard. Ouologuem claimed he had referred in various interviews to his borrowings, but these references were always vague or ambiguous and were offset by his equally fervent affirmation of the African authenticity of the work. Ouologuem came to the United States and Canada on a promotional trip in conjunction with the publication of the American edition of Bound to Violence. The New York Times Book Review published a piece in which the interviewer said Ouologuem showed him many “authentic” sources, such as protographs, ancient documents, and the like. When he appeared on the Today Show to promote his book, Ouologuem told moderator Hugh Downs that he “wrote this book in French but followed the traditional African rhythms and the spirit of the African past.” In various interviews he referred vaguely to “international models,” and the like, but it is only with hindsight that these references can be construed as confessions. Representative of how he “fielded” interview questions are the answers given in an interview granted Plexus. Asked if there “aren't a great many things in [his] book which [he] might have identified with and expressed in the first person?” Ouologuem replied “I would never have enjoyed writing a book in the first person. I prefer to let the systems speak and reveal themselves rather than take myself as the unique point of reference.”²¹ Then, when asked why he wrote Le Devoir de violence, the Malian replied:

I think that one writes because of a moment when one reaches a certain density of being. … On the level of form, I wanted to make the epic speak, the tales of the griots, the Arab chroniclers, the oral African tradition. I had to reconstitute a form of speech filtered through a vision arising authentically from black roots.

(Ibid., 136.)

There were two reactions to the disclosure of Ouologuem's borrowings from other works, the immediate ones of critical disappointment and the author's self-justification and the long-range one. There was also a more concrete immediate reaction of major consequence, for subsequent to the Greene revelation, the various editions were, indeed, withdrawn from publication:

Mr. Greene's notification [of the similarity by Robert McDonald who, as a devotee of Greene's works, noticed the passage in Bound to Violence and contacted the Englishman] came just in time to stop a shipment of 250 copies of Bound to Violence being distributed in Ibadan but too late to stop 3,000 in Nairobi, where they had been put on sale for a few weeks.

The American paperback version was on the presses and the cover had been made when publication was halted.

Mr Williams Jovanovich, chairman of Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, the American publishers, said he had withdrawn 3,400 hardback copies of the book as soon as Mr Greene's agent in New York had asked them to do so.

(Devlin, p. 2.)

A representative of Editions du Seuil said that they “accepted that the passage had been borrowed and had asked M. Ouologuem to supply a new text.” The Times quotes her as saying: “We sent him a stiff letter … telling him the book had been taken out of publication until this was done. So far we have not had a satisfactory reply.” (Ibid.)

The long-range reaction is even more complex. It brings into question the whole notion of authenticity, literary proprietorship, the concept of genre, and the definition of art in general. In other words, once it has been established that Ouologuem did not write a book consistent with its description as given by either the author or the early book reviewers, what does one do with it? Seth Wolitz has written an eloquent if somewhat confused panegyric in defense of Ouologuem in which he raises some challenging questions. Faithful to a “new critical” stance, he would disallow any external biographical or historical explication which might tarnish our enjoyment of the work. He takes several critics to task for having termed Ouologuem and his work “unauthentic” once the source-indebtedness became known. Wolitz writes:

Ouologuem is no longer an authentic African writer. He makes use of non-African sources and, what's worse, fails to alert the critics to his borrowings at the foot of the page. (Since when have European novelists and dramatists declared their sources?) What, should an African novelist who is making use of a non-African genre, a non-African language, be deprived of the right to draw on European models, on literary techniques and motivations imitated from non-African sources?²²

Now, no one would deny Ouologuem the right to consider extra-African subjects or to “write in the style” of European writers—and the idea of footnoting the derivations which Wolitz finds repugnant did not seem to bother Ouologuem according to K. W.'s testimony quoted above—but I still consider authenticity of vision to be the one sine qua non quality in a serious writer of any age or culture. There is, however, an authenticity which is modal! If we consider a Duchamps ready-made or objet-trouvé, the value lies not so much in the object as in the philosophy of art which would allow one to dub an object a piece of artistic interest. Wolitz and several other panegyzers have completely missed the boat, for the notion of “authenticity” as they would vouchsafe it in Ouologuem is rationalized in terms of modern European conventions which reject old concepts of what art is. In maintaining that Le Devoir de violence is authentically African because it is consistent with the new novel, new-wave film, and the like, critics are merely colonizing Ouologuem's alleged authenticity … We do not have, as Wolitz proverbially suggests, “new wine in old bottles,” but rather old colonialism in a new critic's clothing. There remain, then, two questions of fundamental importance in this debate: 1) why did Ouologuem use the sources as he did? and 2) what are the implications of such borrowing in the context of African tradition?

The first question is conveniently asked by Wolitz: “It is, nevertheless, appropriate to ask why Ouologuem found inspiration in the novels of Greene and Schwarz-Bart” (Ibid, 134). Wolitz suggests that perhaps these two borrowings simply represent a personal literary creation inspired by a model and a stylistic processus to be developed (Ibid.). If Wolitz prefers to give Ouologuem the benefit of the doubt, he should find it instructive to seek the rather specific answer to his question elsewhere in Ouologuem's own writings.

Lettre à la France nègre, published very shortly after Le Devoir de violence, is a collection of somewhat flimsy diatribes against the racial and cultural colonialism of France. One essay, entitled “Lettre aux pisse-copie, Nègres d'écrivains célèbres,” is extremely interesting with regard to the controversy over Ouologuem's alleged plagiarism; it also provides ancillary evidence to support the notion that it was, indeed, Ouologuem and not his publishers who deleted the quotation marks somewhere between the chaotic rough draft and the final edition of Le Devoir de violence. Furthermore, this essay and the manuscript's annotations reported by K. W. clearly establish intent to borrow and obviate the possibility of an unwitting recall of previously read material by someone with a photographic memory. As I have said, we shall consider the implications of borrowing in the context of African aesthetics, but with regard to the creative process used in the specific case of Ouologuem's novel, “Lettre aux pisse-copie” provides more than enough of an answer. This essay lays the grounds, as well, for my suspicion that there may be dozens, even hundreds, of sources more or less faithfully plundered by Ouologuem in his prize-winning opus.

In this essay he addresses himself to “Chère Négraille” but it is fair to assume that he is also speaking to France and the White man. Ouologuem writes: “You famous writers' Black boys, you are terribly frustrated, and castrated in your genius by the law of silence: I want you to learn, through these pages, how to proceed in order to be a “pisse-copie” and to remain white.”²³ He then states that he will show his readers how to write a work in a representative vein, in this case that of the detective story; but the modus operandi can be applied to any type for work, and when Ouologuem describes the archetypal detective novel with “its gems of description, eroticism, and suspense, as well as the cream of the crop of its perfect crimes, the collection of their recipes …” (Ibid., 167), he could very well be characterizing Le Devoir de violence. Furthermore, in the lists of names he suggests as sources, at least one has been connected to a passage in Le Devoir de violence (John MacDonald and the asp scene).

Although his syntax is ambiguous in this instance, Ouologuem seems almost confessional when he writes:

I herewith give you, oh cancerous wretch of kitchen literature!, an unpublished gimmick which will permit you to mass produce all the works your boss might order. Base your work exclusively (since that's the genre we are dealing with) on the famous titles of the detective novel: the masters of the Série Noire (Carter Brown, James Hadley Chase, Peter Cheyney, John MacDonald, Robert Fish, Douglas Warner …), those of the Série Blanche, particularly the authors of spy novels (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) or those of “sensational” crimes: Truman Capote, Hitchcok [sic], Simenon, Agatha Christie, Jean Bruce, and many others edited by Fayard and au Masque, either in the purple series or by Denoël (Sébastien Japrisot), or again in the Fleuve Noir or Presses Pockets.

(Ibid.)

I suspect that a meticulous comparison of Le Devoir de violence and the books by authors mentioned in this essay would yield some interesting similarities. Ouologuem goes on to suggest in no uncertain terms how one can create acceptable books painlessly by using a compilation method not unlike the game played by the Surrealists—called “Le Cadavre exquis”—in which chance and multiple authorship produce surprising sentences. The following passage is devastatingly pertinent:

So, dear Black rabble, you have before you here an immense job of reading, a gigantic compilation. But it will not be time wasted.

Here, indeed, is the magic potion in your formula. Your work as a pisse-copie, a famous writers' Black boy, should now permit you—just like the Surrealists—to play “cadavre exquis,” as did the Dadaïsts. But this is no more than an allegory, for to delve into intellectualism would be ill-advised …

For your books (such as I advise you to fabricate them henceforth) must allow you to invent, in the corridors of your imagination, A BILLION NOVELS PAINLESSLY! …

And here is the sort of device which will give you the work fully prepared: now it's up to you to find, for your public, the sauce which will make the dish a success.

(Ibid., 168)

Ouologuem's recipe consists of conceiving of a very general framework (“All there remains is for you to provide it with the largest accommodating framework [structures d'accueil] with regard to its novelty—which will know no rivalry …” Ibid., 169) within which one concocts a work of optimum heterogeneity and balance by introducing at will sections of suspense, eroticism, violence, humor, and the like. To be certain of success, one should draw his passages from appropriate columns of lifted materials labeled “Suspense,” “Eroticism,” and so on, which one has established in advance. Ouologuem even provides a sample fold-out with his essay. The would-be author then need only make minor adjustments in order for his borrowings to conform to the general framework and, voilà!, a completed novel. Ouologuem cautions the potential pisse-copie that he has one duty: “Operate under the double calling of pedagogy and research, of flattery towards the accommodating framework, even as you retain a clear awareness of the cross-references of the plot” (Ibid., 177).

Given the laborious but unimaginative method he prescribes and the fact that Le Devoir de violence was conceived in student notebooks, we could go so far as to interpret the word “devoir” in the title as meaning not “duty”—the apparent sense—so much as “homework.”

Now to our second question: namely, how African is the book? The fact that Le Devoir de violence is largely a paste-up of unoriginal material which has been appropriately adapted to fit the book's general “structure d'accueil” does not mean that it is without significance per se. If it is not deeply African in its contents, it may be that one or more major African impulses were nevertheless present in the attitude of the author with regard to the notion of plagiarism—even, perhaps, unbeknownst to him—as well as in the general characteristics emerging within the larger structure of his work. In other words, I contend that while the basic contents and method of composition are not spontaneously African, Ouologuem has—in opting for an episodic structure, contrived though it might be—remained faithful to at least one fundamental African impulse found expressed in the majority of Franco-African literary works from Laye's L'Enfant noir to Kourouma's Les Soleils des Indépendances. The African writer tends, by virtue of age-old traditions of the khawaré or “veillée poétique” and the oral folk-tale, to prefer to channel his creativity into short, self-contained episodes without undue attention to logical or smooth transitions. Within the larger “structure d'accueil” of the khawaré we have a variety of songs, dances, poetic chants, and musical renditions, and it was inevitable that African novels should either adopt compatible European forms like the diary, the collection of tales, and the series of salient memories neatly encapsulated in chapters, or else twist prose into an episodic structure. Examples of the former are Oyono's Une Vie de boy and Laye's L'Enfant noir and Dramouss; an example of the latter is Les Soleils des Indépendances which has an overall structure but is textually made up of shorter entities at times resembling African fables and extended proverbs.

Thus, the collage effect which well-meaning defenders of Ouologuem would justify superficially in terms of Parisian aesthetics might better be justified in profound terms of African aesthetics. A more penetrating analysis of traditional African aesthetics leads us into another area of conjecture. Gobineau was obviously paternalistic and racist without realizing it when he said of African aesthetics that there was, no doubt, an African conception of beauty, but that it was defective compared to the “real” Graeco-Roman beauty.

Traditional African aesthetics, based as it is on a lingua-ontology quite different from the European, balks at the idea of exclusivity of artistic expression. The African artist qua craftsman has traditionally been concerned with an imitation of nature—indeed the “objective correlative” is a universal concern of the artist in all areas and times—but his approach to mimesis is not quite that which the Westerner's has become. We are, in Occidental aesthetics, concerned primarily with the imitation in vacuo, having been led to that place by Plato, Descartes, Valéry, and a host of other artists qua philosophers. We hoard these imitations of nature in libraries and art museums, paying millions of dollars not for a work of art but for a “Picasso,” a “Pollock,” or a “Rembrandt.” Proprietorship and the urge to inscribe “fecit” after one's name are characteristic of Western art.

In the various societies called “primitive,” art has maintained an efficacious function in that the artist is intimately caught up in a vital process involving art as a force and the world as things and forces, the interaction being modal. The late Janheinz Jahn has brilliantly summarized African philosophy, or more accurately lingua-ontology, in his controversial book Muntu.²⁴ Suffice it to say, here, that in a world of bantu (human beings), bintu (things), hantu (idea of place and time), and kuntu (modality, such as laughter), man has a degree of dominion over things by virtue of his existential perception of them. Things are, in a sense, whatever purpose they serve, their function being conferred by man qua magician or artist. Therefore, aesthetics in such societies involves participation and the modality of the conferral process as much as it does the compositional attributes of the end product. Unlike Western art, it is meaningless in the African context to say, for instance, that a Dogon statue of a standing male figure is “better” than a Fang figure; each no doubt does precisely what it can be expected to do. As Jahn mentions, two like sculptures can represent a king and a peasant according to what the artist has dubbed them, and he can—with his power of nommo—redub them at will. Stripped of nommo—their designation and participatory essence—they are mere wood and can be discarded, left to termites, or launched on their way to end up on an art dealer's shelf in some European or American city. The so-called primitive is, indeed, concerned with an imitation of nature. He is not, however, concerned with rendering immortal imitations but rather with understanding and finding the means of expressing that which he knows to be immortal.

Even in the new literatures resulting from the linguistic and cultural overlay brought to Africa by French, English, and Portuguese colonialism, the basic lingua-ontological impulse must certainly survive. Indeed, the fact that indigenous impulses are expressed in externally-imposed forms has contributed to the creation of a vigorous and unique brand of creativity in the African hybrid literatures.²⁵ Now, the traditional anonymity of the craftsman-artist, whose patron is not posterity but the village or clan, makes the notion of plagiarism absolutely irrelevant. The M'zabite rug-maker in the Saharan hill town of Beni-Isguen will automatically use the town pattern when weaving his rug, and not be concerned with who invented the pattern nor with royalties. The pattern is the property of all in the community, patented only by local custom and geographical identity. Similarly, one would scarcely accuse the Bambara sculptor of lacking originality or of stealing ideas when he makes a mask in the tribe's recognizable traditional style! If Pound's adopted imperial motto “Make It New” sums up the Western preoccupation with originality and novelty, “Make it Inevitable” might be applicable to the African attitude which respects constancy and tradition.

The Ouologuem affair is a tragic byproduct of the culture conflict inherent in hybrid literatures which adopt the lingua of another country but maintain their own ontology (that the conflict can be surmounted with authenticity is borne out by the works of men like Birago Diop). African critics are less nervous than Europeans about plagiarism, feeling no doubt deep in their souls that the writer is a craftsman who owes allegiance to his readership and not to some pantheon or confrérie of past writers. In one sense, the tragedy of the Ouologuem affair lies to an equal degree in the European tradition of ownership and the quest for private immortality which would cause Mr. Greene or Western critics to care if Ouologuem has borrowed patterns and words from the British novelist. From the puristic traditional African viewpoint, to so borrow is no more spurious than to write a letter using a published book of examples as a guide or than it was for the poets of the Pléiade to use classical authors' texts for material when concocting a commissioned poem. The conflict is aggravated in the case of Le Devoir de violence—obviously not at all due to Ouologuem's intervention—because the book turned out to be highly successful, winning a prize which guaranteed enormous sales. Just as the traditional African barter system, prior to the introduction of a currency standard by the colonial traders, made hoarding of material wealth neither practical nor sensible, so did tradition limit the gain an artist-craftsman could achieve from his talents (true, as well, of the poets of Europe before movable type and mass media made literature a public commodity). The mystique which surrounds a writer in the West can only be parleyed into a fortune if it is individualized and original, and therefore the writers see to it that their individuation is protected by copyright law.

Ouologuem has committed a European faux-pas. Obviously a man of some genius, Ouologuem must have known that he was violating accepted procedure. He made the grievous error of first hiding his methods and then trying to make light of them. He has also, by calculated use of material created by others—not in the tribal tradition but in the European market place of individuation—done a disservice to his fellow African writers (whom he alternately refers to as his “frères de race” and “négraille”). Many of the writers whose impulses have led them to adopt or emulate without malice the rhythms of admired foreign writers may now find themselves accused of having used the tactics employed and promulgated by Yambo Ouologuem. Finally, Ouologuem may very well have the ability to write a great novel about Africa—entirely of his own vision—but were he to do so, it is doubtful that any publisher or reader would look upon the work without a great deal of skepticism.

Notes

1. Yambo Ouologuem, Le Devoir de violence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968); British and American editions: Bound to Violence, translated by R. Manheim (London: Heinemann/Secker & Warburg, 1971; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971). Yambo is the author's surname, but like the Algerian novelist Kateb Yacine he uses the reversed form of his name on his book covers.

2. A fairly detailed summary of Le Devoir de violence is given in Yves Benot, “Le Devoir de violence de Yambo Ouologuem est-il un chef-d'œuvre ou une mystification?” La Pensée, No. 149 (février 1970), 127–31. There is also a summary in Mpiku's essay (See note 8, below.).

3. Tim Devlin, “Echoes of Graham Greene halt Prizewinning Book,” The Times (London), May 5, 1972, p. 1.

4. “Vient de paraître,” Le Monde, Supplément au numéro 7344, 24 août 1968, p. ii.

5. Matthieu Galey, “Le Devoir de violence de Yambo Ouologuem, un grand roman africain,” Le Monde, Supplément au numéro 7386, 12 octobre 1968, p. i.

6. In La Machine infernale, which retells the Oedipus tale, the characters coincidentally speak truth; for example, when Jocasta trips over the scarf with which she will later hang herself she idiomatically exclaims: “This scarf will be the death of me”; and at one time the brooch with which Oedipus will blind himself is referred to as an “eye-catcher.” Likewise, when pathological liar Thomas is fired at near the trenches, he falls down and reflects that he had better play dead or he is done for, to which the narrator replies that truth and fiction had become so interfused in the mind of Thomas that he had inadvertantly told the truth, for he was dead.

7. Philippe Decraene, “Un Nègre à part entière,” Le Monde, Supplément, 12 octobre 1968, p. i.

8. Mbelolo ya Mpiku, “From One Mystification to Another: ‘Negritude’ and ‘Négraille’ in Le Devoir de violence,” Review of National Literatures, 11, 2 (Fall 1971), 142.

9. Eric Sellin, review in French Review, XLIII, 1 (October 1969), 164.

10. Extract of letter from Schwarz-Bart to Editions du Seuil, dated August 16, 1968, quoted by Paul Flamand in letter to me dated May 9, 1972.

11. Letter to me dated July 3, 1972.

12. The great similarity in wording in the blurbs on the back covers of Le Dernier des Justes and Le Devoir de violence and the similar charges of indebtedness levelled at Schwarz-Bart's prize-winning novel a decade earlier threatened—apparently unjustifiably—to open a critical and legal Pandora's box.

13. As early as 1969, the Canard Enchaîné detected some lines lifted from de Maupassant.

14. Alfredo Riedel, Cultura negro africana moderna (Trieste: Edizioni Umana, 1973), p. 40.

15. Bernth Lindfors forwarded a good many newspaper clippings and leads he received in personal correspondence. One letter to him from Anita Kern passes on various African and European professors' unpublished assertions of derivations from Pascal, de Maupassant, Suret-Canale, and half a dozen other authors. This information reconfirms my suspicion that a great many sources are linked to Le Devoir de violence. I am indebted as well to the following people who either sent me clippings or supplied valuable information: M.-S. Dembri, Paul Flamand, Charles R. Larson, and Wilbert Roget. Efforts to contact Ouologuem were unsuccessful. The one Paris address I was given was an obvious and amusing coinage: 4345 rue de la Double Dissoire.

16. “Our eyes take in the light of dead stars. A biography of my friend Ernie would easily fit into the second quarter of the twentieth century; but the real story of Ernie Levy begins very early, around the year 1000 of our era, in the old Anglican city of York. More precisely: March 11, 1185.”

    “Our eyes drink in the dazzle of the sun, and, conquered, are amazed that they cry. Maschallah! oua bismillah! … An account of the bloody adventure of the Black rabble—shame on those men of nothingness!—would easily fit into the first half of this century; but the real story of the Blacks begins much, much earlier, with the Saïfs, in the year 1202 of our era, in the African Empire of Nakem, in the south of the Fezzan, long after the conquests of Okba ben Nafi el Fitri.” (My translations.)

17. A research student in Australia, Robert McDonald, detected the derivation despite two translations (that into French and that back into English) and notified Mr Greene who in turn contacted his publisher who made this wry comment: “Greene came on the telephone to me. There was a dry, old-paper feel about his voice. You could almost tear it. I immediately turned up the pages and there it was. It is remarkable how it has survived in translation.” (Devlin, op. cit., p. 2.)

18. Robert McDonald, “Bound to Violence: a case of plagiarism,” Transition, 41 (1972), 67–68. The pagination referred to is in the English version.

19. Figaro Littéraire, 10 juin 1972, p. 17.

20. K. W., “In Defence of Yambo Ouologuem,” West Africa, 21 July 1972, p. 941.

21. Translated as “An Interview with Yambo Ouologuem,” in Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts, 9/10 (Winter/Spring, 1971), 134–35.

22. Seth I. Wolitz, “L'Art du plagiat, ou, une brève défense de Ouologuem,” in Research in African Literatures, IV, I (Spring 1973), 131.

23. Yambo Ouologuem, Lettre à la France nègre (Paris: Editions Edmond Nalis, copyright 1968, “achevé d'imprimer,” janvier 1969), p. 166.

24. Janheinz Jahn, Muntu, An Outline of the New African Culture (New York: Grove Press, 1961); See also Eric Sellin, “African Art: Compositional vs. Modal Esthetics,” Yale Review, LIX, 2 (Winter 1970), 215–27.

25. I have, here, adapted a phrase by Janet Abu-Lughod who aptly speaks of the paradox in modern Maghrebine cities as that combining “externally-stimulated urban forms with indigenous impulses, needs and problems” (“Cities Blend the Past to Face the Future,” Africa Report, XVI, 6 [June 1971], 12).