[In the following essay, Olney analyzes the perceptions of “blackness” and “négritude” in the works of Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Yambo Ouologuem.]

They order this matter differently in Francophone Africa. Whether one judges that they order it better, as Laurence Sterne declares is the case in France herself, or order it worse, will depend no doubt on the observer's sensibilities; that they order it differently, however, is beyond dispute. The fiction that borders on sociology and anthropology, the novel that describes for us a people, their traditions and their culture, and recreates the traditional, coherent community for us in representative figures—as Chinua Achebe does for the Ibo and James Ngugi for the Gikuyu, even as Ezekiel Mphahlele does for the alienated and exiled South African, though it would be contradictory to call this last a traditional or coherent group—these ethnographic portraits in prose scarcely exist in the literature produced by African writers in French. Things Fall Apart, as Davidson Nicol rightly points out, is very specifically oriented and ethnically focussed: Achebe's first novel, he says, is interesting to European readers “because of what is to them its setting in a classic rural African society; but to an African reader the setting does not present itself as African, but specifically, as Ibo.”¹ One need not, as Nicol seems to imply, be African to observe that it is crucially important for an understanding of Achebe's fiction to recall that he is Ibo, and the same goes for the “Gikuyuness” of James Ngugi's novels; if we forget that Mphahlele is a déraciné from urban South Africa, neither Down Second Avenue nor The Wanderers will have much meaning at all for us. But it is of comparatively little consequence that Camara Laye is Malinké or that he is from Guinée, that Yambo Ouologuem is Dogon or that he is from Mali, that Cheikh Hamidou Kane is Peul or that he is from Sénégal. The fact and significance of blackness, with all the reverberations that literal and symbolic condition has produced in history, psychology, philosophy, religion, and literature, is of infinitely greater moment in reading the fiction of Camara Laye, Yambo Ouologuem, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane than either specific ethnic culture or nationality. Not that these three writers perceive the same significance in blackness, for indeed they do not; but they all concentrate their search for meaning on the question of what it is to be black, or what it is to be African, both in history and in the present, both in Africa and in Europe, rather than on such questions as what it is to be Ibo or Nigerian, what it is to be Gikuyu or Kenyan, what it is to be a forced wanderer from South Africa.

One should hasten to say, however, that by “the fact and significance of blackness” one does not intend quite the same thing as “négritude.” It has become almost a cliché in the criticism of African literature to observe that writers in French adhere to the doctrine of négritude as an aesthetic principle and that writers in English, from Wole Soyinka to Chinua Achebe to Ezekiel Mphahlele, reject négritude as being in no way a valid criterion for judging literature. Achebe, for example, expressed succinctly the typical negative response to négritude of African writers in English, and incidentally drew the line in linguistic terms, when he declared (in an interview published, ironically, in French) that for him as a writer the doctrine was simply meaningless: “Je suis contre les slogans. Je ne pense pas que, par exemple, la ‘négritude’ ait un sens quelconque. Le panafricanisme? Peut-être. La négritude, non. Je ne peux pas comprendre pourquoi un grand nombre d'écrivains africains, d'expression française notamment, ont une telle nostalgie pour le passé.”² Achebe's remark is not difficult to understand—négritude has, for the most part, been proclaimed by writers in French and not by writers in English—but the contrast between French and English writing from Africa goes much deeper than an adherence to or a denial of négritude, or it is centered elsewhere. Achebe's last remark, however, may point the way, at least through a back door, to formulating the real distinctions between the two bodies of literature. It is obviously fair comment to say that Camara Laye, especially in L'enfant noir, exhibits a nostalgia for the past. But Achebe's own Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart, as I have suggested earlier, are not entirely free of some nostalgia for the past, tempered though it may be by a hint of flaws in the old society. And again, in fiction in French, no one would suggest that Yambo Ouologuem displays any nostalgia for the past, or for anything else, in Le Devoir de violence: “This novel,” according to the Cameroonian writer Simon Mpondo, “more than anything ever written, marks … the end of Negritude's rosy image of ancestral Africa. …”³ So novelists from Francophone Africa do not necessarily or invariably resemble one another in declaring for négritude or in yearning for the past, not at this late date anyway, nor can they always be distinguished from their Anglophone counterparts on bases of négritude and nostalgia. Yet there are important ways in which Yambo Ouologuem's writing resembles Camara Laye's but differs from Chinua Achebe's, and ways in which Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambiguë relates to Le Devoir de violence and Le regard du roi but contrasts with Things Fall Apart and Weep Not, Child and The Wanderers.

To put the contrast in rather stark and exaggerated terms, the novel from French West Africa tends to be abstract and philosophic in its thought, yet concrete and sensuous in its apprehension of the world and in its expression. The West African novel in English, on the other hand, most often comes down midway between these poles of abstraction and sensuousness to discover its subject and its mode not in any philosophical dialectics but in social structures and social conflicts. As a description of their apprehension and presentation of reality, it would be legitimate to call Le regard du roi, L'aventure ambiguë, and Le Devoir de violence “philosophical” novels, but it is very near impossible to think of a single African novel in English, whether from West Africa, East Africa, or South Africa, for which “philosophical” would be an appropriate adjective. Likewise, no Anglophone fiction expresses itself in the highly colored prose of African fiction in French—the deliberately repulsive images and revolting language of, for example, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (by the Ghanaian Ayi Kwei Armah) not being at all the sort of thing one has in mind in describing the vision and the expression of Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Yambo Ouologuem as highly sensuous. This philosophic-sensory mode issues often in a variety of mysticism—very unlike anything in the hardheaded, realistic, social fiction of African writers in English—and it produces something that one might call the “symbolic” novel as opposed to the “representative” novel written by, say, Achebe. The range of reference or the scope of significance in the three specified novels in French is continental; it is simply African—i. e., pan-African—as against the limited cultural reference (Ibo and ex-British colony) in Things Fall Apart or No Longer at Ease. The characters and events of French West African literature symbolize experience that is virtually universal in occurrence, at least in the perspective of the writer within Africa; the characters and events of English West African literature, on the other hand, represent something ethnically limited and geographically and politically restricted.

The best current example of all these tendencies in French fiction from West Africa, and a very brilliant novel besides, is Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence (called, in the excellent translation by Ralph Manheim, Bound to Violence).⁴ Though any philosophy that Ouologuem might profess would no doubt be quite different from Camara Laye's or Cheikh Hamidou Kane's philosophy, yet their novels are all philosophical in the same sense, and though their varieties of mysticism differ (Camara Laye is a nature mystic, Kane a religious mystic, and Ouologuem a sensual mystic), yet they are all, more or less, mystics. “My novel is not traditional,” Ouologuem has said, “and, although it is based in fact and history, it is not autobiographical.”⁵ In Bound to Violence, as also in his intensely ironic Lettre à la France nègre, Ouologuem still is concerned, as any writer of négritude literature might be, with his own and his ancestral past—indeed, he is very profoundly concerned with it—but he is far too subtle and complex, not to say too ironic and scornful, to accept, as a sufficient relation to that past, the cultural narcissism offered up by what he calls “les concierges de la négritude.”⁶ It is true, as Ouologuem says, that his book is not, in any strict sense, “autobiographical”: its details are not drawn from nor do they relate only to the author's own life or his private experience. But in another and larger sense, the book might be said to have in it certain autobiographical elements and intentions: it performs an act of symbolic autobiography not, like Achebe, for a specific group of Africans, whether that group be Ibo or Dogon, but for black Africans in general. “My aim,” Ouologuem told a correspondent from West Africa, “is to do violence to the misconceptions of Africans so that we can realise what the real problems are. This is our ‘duty of violence.’”⁷ Elsewhere, he refers to “I'image d'une Afrique par trop déformée par ses chantres et ses littérateurs” (Lettre, p. 190), and it is precisely this grossly distorted image of Africa and Africans that Ouologuem would destroy, replacing it with a valid portrait based on a revision of history and a redefinition of personality, a redrawing of the African image. Thus Le Devoir de violence represents, it seems to me, something that one might take, in a figurative sense, for a reconstituted and epic autobiography of Africa and her people.

History, which plays the same role in the autobiography of a continent as memory does in the autobiography of an individual, is vitally important to Ouologuem's effort. What he sets about doing, primarily in Devoir de violence but also in the journalistic-essayistic-satiric mishmash that he calls Lettre à la France nègre, is to revise, essentially and radically, the history of black Africa. “And if you thought that the end of colonialism was the end of the agony, then it is time to wake up,” Ezekiel Mphahlele told the participants in the Dakar Conference in 1963.⁸ To the sentimentalized history of Africa written by négritude historians (African or European), fitted out with the stock characters of the good black man in his primal African paradise and the bad white man who came like Satan to destroy and enslave, both Mphahlele and Ouologuem say “No,” because psychologically that image is too simple and historically it is, in part if not entirely, false. Not only did the agony of Africans not end with the end of colonialism, according to Ouologuem, but it also had its beginning long, long before the advent of Europeans in Africa. “Voilà,” Ouologuem says, after the Congo and Biafra, “soudain que l'on ne peut plus prétendre devoir cultiver les champs fleuris de l'Afrique gentillette et heureuse, baptisée dans le bonheur idyllique avant l'arrivée de l'Homme blanc …” (Lettre, p. 190). In Ouologuem's reading of history, there were Africans, both the “Notables” and Arabs, who were past masters in inflicting human agony on what Ouologuem, with bitter irony, chooses to call the “négraille” (“niggertrash”) long before the “Flençèssi” (the French) came, with their ridiculous name and their delusions of power, to exercise their particular but, in comparison with the Saifs, inexpert and “humane” brand of agony. And far from having been baptised in idyllic happiness, the continent, like its population, had been “baptisé dans le supplice: baptised in torture.”⁹ Though he aims at doing violence to a false image by way of writing an accurate history of black Africa, Ouologuem has no intention, of course, of simply standing the old image on its head—that would be as distorted as the first view that gives all evil to the European, all good to the African. Ouologuem, it is true, finds a great plenty of evil for the white man, but he is too generous with that commodity to deny the black man his share in evil as well; he is more even-handed than either négritude historians or colonial apologists in distributing vices among Africans and Europeans. One might quote the remark that Ouologuem uses as an epigraph to Chapter III of Les Milles et une bibles du sexe—“Qu'est-ce le vice? Un goût qu'on ne partage pas.”—¹⁰ and suggest that in his view, a rather cynical one, this would apply to hypocritical African shock before European vices as well as to European horror at so-called African savagery. But that each world has its own vices might well imply that each has its characteristic virtues too.

Again in an ironic tone and cynical voice, Ouologuem, in his Lettre à la France nègre, suggests the probable motive lying behind what he considers the fantasies of négritude; at the same time, he hints at what he intends in Bound to Violence and what there might be of a positive nature in African history to fill out the largely negative achievement of that novel. “Si la négritude, cependant, vaut toujours parce qu'elle est un cadre auquel il reste encore à donner meilleur contenu, ce contenu ne saurait être que s'il n'érige pas des autels et des statues à cent mythes, qui ne répondent et n'ont jamais correspondu à quoi que ce soit de vivant en Afrique: foire aux chimères où s'est exaltée l'imagination de plus d'un marchand d'idéologie, échaffaudant mille impostures dont le mérite—peut-être—est de rassurer, à la Bourse des valeurs de la primitivité, tous les petits rentiers de la tragi-comédie …” (p. 191).

So the concept of “Negrohood” (as it is called in one of Senghor's many statements on the subject) may, after all, be worth something, but only if a new painting is fitted to the frame of négritude, only if it is redefined, only if the history of black Africa is rewritten and the personality of the black African redrawn. Ouologuem has a new picture to put in the frame, of course, a picture he calls Le Devoir de violence, which would not only deprive the addict of old-style négritude of many of his most cherished illusions, but would also lower the stock-exchange value of the hoked-up primitive arts produced by the happy and noble savage, that phantom that issues from the heated and sentimental imagination of “journalistes, sociologues, ethnologues, africanistes, littérateurs et négrophiles ‘spécialisés,’” all of whom have a vested interest in maintaining the image of the simple, noble primitive that they themselves have created and that they sell on the various world markets: “mi y'a bon, banania, mi Platon petit nègre,” Ouologuem says, with bitterness, of this fantasy creature.¹¹

For the most part, Ouologuem's historical revisionism is carried out with a kind of violent and grotesque good humor, but even so, insanely comic as it sometimes is, what Ouologuem does is largely a negative thing, a mad, antic dance performed on the grave of négritude, and the conclusion to which he comes is pervasively pessimistic and melancholy. “He admits,” according to the interviewer in West Africa (p. 1475), “that his novel is negative since it provides no solution to the problems posed. …” As a satirist—and satire is a very large part of his intention—Ouologuem is an unyieldingly aggressive and destructive artist, attacking and ridiculing, not creating and defending. The satirist's art, as Ouologuem practices it, neither offers solutions of its own nor proposes answers; instead it exposes problems and opposes the too facile solutions of others. What is positive in Devoir de violence comes only as an implication, sometimes only as an implication from an implication—which, for the unwary reader, can be a very dangerous exercise in fixing an author's attitude or discovering his meaning. The tone of Devoir de violence—and of Lettre à la France nègre and Les Milles et une bibles du sexe, for that matter—is so consistently and impenetrably ironic, so much a matter of personæ assumed, shifted, and transformed, that the reader almost never knows if he has Ouologuem or if he has simply another leering, grimacing mask hiding whatever (if anything) lies behind it. There are, however, two aspects of Bound to Violence that have an implicit positiveness about them and there is, further, an implication, necessarily tenuous and elusive, that one might draw from these two implied positives: first, there is the terrific and compressed energy with which Ouologuem accomplishes his destruction; and, second, there is the texture of Ouologuem's extraordinary and brilliant prose. Both these relate more to the manner of the book than to its matter, and to draw conclusions about the author's positive beliefs, his ideas, his philosophy, from aspects of his stylistic manner can be, as I have suggested, rather dangerous—especially as Ouologuem frequently writes in styles that are confessedly borrowed: the style of the griots, of the Arab historians, and of the traditional tales of family and clan (not to mention the style of Graham Greene). Be that as it may, I think that Ouologuem's use of language—an extremely rich, colorful, intense, and sensorily heightened vehicle for whatever his vision may be—implies a good deal about what he takes to be the deepest reality of Africa as “an immense body in quest of its identity” (Bound to Violence, p. 167), or what he understands as the essential nature of Africa as a spiritual-sensory experience. In the experience of Ouologuem's Africa, spirit and senses are inextricably joined, as they are also in the language that he uses to render that experience. It is here, in this linguistically implied vision of what Africanness is and what likewise the experience of Africa is—a unified mode of being—that Ouologuem turns most clearly away from African writers in English, from Chinua Achebe and Ezekiel Mphahlele, and approaches writers whom in other ways he hardly resembles at all: Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Camara Laye.

If one omits his remark about “tendresse” (though in context it is a legitimate observation), what Robert Pageard has to say about L'aventure ambiguë and Le regard du roi applies also to Bound to Violence and makes of them a novelistic trio characteristic of West African literature in French: “L'audace de la langue, le symbolisme, le glissement vers le fantastique, une tendresse tout à fait contraire aux tendances européennes actuelles, apparentent L'aventure ambiguë au Regard du roi de Laye Camara.”¹² If we were to change that “tendresse”—for Ouologuem only—to eroticism or sensuality, then we would have an adequate description of Bound to Violence, which, like the other two novels, mediates, by means of symbolism, between the poles of philosophic abstraction and sensory experience. Ambiguous Adventure, for which the reader hardly requires an introductory note to recognize that there is an “autobiographical savour”¹³ about it, tells the story of Samba Diallo, educated in a traditional Islamic school, then in a French school in Africa, and finally in Paris, until, drawn apart by the diverse philosophies of Islamic Africa and Christian Europe, he feels that he has lost that unity of being which he enjoyed when he was able to concentrate his existence entirely in his religious belief. The autobiographical element in Ambiguous Adventure has little to do with the traditional customs and the ceremonial observances of a social group (as in Achebe and Ngugi). Here the autobiography is of the mind and the spirit, of thoughts and beliefs and attitudes; it is a philosophical autobiography, and the characters represent various philosophic possibilities and influences. Samba Diallo, when he talks of his study of philosophy in France, refers to it as an “adventure” and thinks of that adventure as dangerous: “It may be that we shall be captured at the end of our itinerary, vanquished by our adventure itself” (p. 104). Indeed, he suggests that he may well have chosen philosophy as a subject because of its dangerousness. For Samba Diallo, as for his creator, it is not material prosperity or technical learning or women or anything so gross that seduces the African to lose his identity to Europe. The real enemy is a foreign philosophy, attractive, seductive, beguiling: sinuous lines of thought and chains of pure logic, intimate intercourse of abstract ideas and the copulation of disembodied concepts. This separation of thought from total being, or transformation of being into abstract, acting and interacting ideas, is a dangerous game, as Samba Diallo's fate demonstrates, for one whose being has heretofore been entirely absorbed in his belief. Before going to France, under the influence of his father and the guidance of his Islamic teacher, Samba Diallo participated in a union, not of abstractions in the head, but of full being with divine spirit—a mystic union, identity of the believer and his belief, the worshipper and his worship.

Though Samba Diallo may succumb to the wiles of Western abstraction so that he ends up, in his person as in his philosophic practice, an example of Cartesian dualism, divided in being and ambiguous in will, his creator, as author of the novel, does not follow him. Kane says, among other things, that the implicit philosophic assumptions of Africa and France are very different and that, in the case of Samba Diallo anyway, it is not possible to reconcile them. Yet Ambiguous Adventure, as a dramatization of contrasting philosophies, as an embodiment of differing attitudes, as an autobiographical fiction, does include, comprehend, and reconcile the opposed assumptions. It is a novel based on ideas, in the abstract manner of France and the West, but it is also, simultaneously, a novel that dramatizes what Kane indicates is a peculiarly African—specifically Islamic African—philosophy. Perhaps one should simply observe that it proves possible for the artist to reconcile the conflicting assumptions in a way that would not be possible for any man in life.

This reconciliation within the frame of the art work is effected, for example, at the beginning of Chapter Seven when the Frenchman, Paul Lacroix, and Samba Diallo's father, “the knight,” watch a typically African sunset—which may or may not also signify the end of the world. “On the horizon, it seemed as if the earth were poised on the edge of an abyss. Above the abyss the sun was suspended, dangerously. The liquid silver of its heat had been reabsorbed, without any loss of its light's splendor. Only, the air was tinted with red, and under this illumination the little town seemed suddenly to belong to a strange planet” (p. 68). The Frenchman is frightened by this “cosmic drama being played out outside” because it seems to him a portent “that we are closer to the end of the world than we are to nightfall” (pp. 68–69), and he is incapable of believing in the apocalypse: he can imagine the end of the world only as an atomic blast, as some horrible, human-produced accident, not as the culmination and climax of human-divine spiritual intercourse, a consummation, the knight suggests, devoutly to be wished. But as to the atomic blast, the knight says, “Our most simple-minded peasant does not believe in such an end as that, episodic and accidental. His universe does not admit of accident. In spite of appearances, his concept is more reassuring than yours” (p. 69). The two men, living embodiments of opposed philosophies—the abstract, mental, materialistic Westerner who sees history as chance and accident versus the unified sensory-spiritual African, with his immediate knowledge of being, who sees history as providence and as a movement toward a fated end—continue their characteristically intellectual dialogue (characteristic of fiction from French West Africa), reflecting in everything they say what they are and what they mean. “Then from the bottom of my heart,” the knight tells Lacroix, for whom, as a spiritually underdeveloped person, he feels more pity than anything else, “I wish for you to rediscover the feeling of anguish in the face of the dying sun. I ardently wish that for the West. When the sun dies, no scientific certainty should keep us from weeping for it, no rational evidence should keep us from asking that it be reborn. You are slowly dying under the weight of evidence. I wish you that anguish—like a resurrection” (p. 71). Like two symbolic men, which is what they are, the African and the European conclude their dialogue with the end of the day, or the end of the world, or both. “There was a moment of silence. Outside, the vesperal drama had come to an end. The sun had set. Behind it, an imposing mass of bright red cloud had come crumbling down like a monstrous stream of clotted blood. The red splendor of the air had been progressively softened under the impact of the slow invasion of the evening shade” (pp. 71–72).

This mingling of intense intellectuality with brilliant, exotic sensuousness, or this deployment of sensuous effects to an intellectual end, would be hard to match in any novel in English from Africa, but in Ouologuem's writing, where the sensuousness takes an erotic-pornographic turn as against Kane's religious-natural inclination, one finds a similar prose expressing, in one sense, a similar sensibility. Nor is the apocalyptic sunset an isolated passage. It is appropriate, given the philosophic mode of Kane's novel, that at the end, after “the fool” has stabbed Samba Diallo and he is dying, the reader should be reminded of a European philosopher who was surpassingly intellectual (and later on inclined to the mystical) but who had no touch with Africa: Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is appropriate because Kane's great triumph is to combine Western abstraction with African mysticism. “So too at death,” Wittgenstein says, “the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” And, in a dependent corollary to that observation: “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has no limits.”¹⁴ In the subjectively apocalyptic end to his life, a parallel to the sun dying and the day ending, Samba Diallo rejoins abstract thought to sensuous feeling, concentrating his entire being in the moment and on the divine, to achieve again the mystic union from which, in France, he had fallen away into ambiguity. At the moment of his death, when the world ends and time is replaced by the eternity of the present, two voices speak in dialogue, one of them Samba Diallo's consciousness, the other apparently the voice of universal consciousness:

“But it returns to you. Toward whatever side you turn, it is your own countenance that you see, nothing but that. You alone fill the closed circle. You are king. …”

“I am two simultaneous voices. One draws back and the other increases. I am alone. The river is rising. I am in its overflow. … Where are you? Who are you?”

“You are entering the place where there is no ambiguity. Be attentive, for here, now, you are arriving. You are arriving.”

“Hail! I have found again the taste of my mother's milk; my brother who has dwelt in the land of the shadows and of peace, I recognize you. Announcer of the end of exile, I salute you.”

“I am bringing your kingdom back to you. Behold the moment, over which you reign.”

(pp. 163–65)

The last lines of the novel are given over to the two voices, blended now, however, into one, as Samba Diallo's consciousness merges with universal consciousness; and that end of the world, foreseen, anticipated, and desirable, yet unknown and dreaded, that the knight spoke of to Lacroix and that Samba Diallo himself has long contemplated and with which he has been rather more than half in love, is finally achieved. Kane says at one point (p. 47) that “the profound truth” of his story “is wholly sad”; rather than contradict him with the observation that it has a happy ending, it would perhaps be safer to say that the ending is triumphant and simply, entirely mystical.

“The moment is the bed of the river of my thought. The pulsations of the moments have the pulsations of thought; the breath of thought glides into the blow-pipe of the moment. In the sea of time, the moment bears the image of the profile of man. … In the fortress of the moment, man in truth is king, for his thought is all-powerful, when it is. Where it has passed, the pure azure crystallizes in forms. Life of the moment, life without age of the moment which endures, in the flight of your élan man creates himself indefinitely. At the heart of the moment, behold man as immortal, for the moment is made from the absence of time. Life of the moment, life without age of the moment which reigns, in the luminous arena of your duration man unfurls himself to infinity. The sea! Here is the sea! Hail to you, rediscovered wisdom, my victory! The limpidness of your wave is awaiting my gaze. I fix my eyes upon you, and you harden into Being. I am without limit. Sea, the limpidity of your wave is awaiting my gaze. I fix my eyes upon you, and you glitter, without limit. I wish for you, through all eternity.” (pp. 165–66)

So the subjective world explodes at death, as the philosopher would have it, into merger with objective consciousness.

What this grand, mystic climax recalls in other African literature is, of course—leaving Ouologuem's fiction aside for the moment—the end of Camara Laye's Radiance of the King, where Clarence's individual separateness is conclusively dissolved in the embrace of the child King. Kane in his finale, impressive as it is and though his metaphor of the river flowing into the sea is more conventional than the metaphor of the enfant noir in Radiance of the King, does not quite succeed, as Camara Laye does, in overcoming the obvious problems inherent in an attempt to translate mystical experience into images and language. There remains something of the vague and the inapprehensible in Kane's account of mystical transport, while in Laye's novel the child King is immediate and present, tangible and apprehensible as a symbol of the transcendent and the divine. This condition of being that he symbolizes is hinted at earlier when Clarence, impatiently waiting for the King to arrive at some unspecified time in the future, is advised to call on an old woman named Dioki, who lives with her pet snakes and charms them, and, it is suggested, does some other, less mentionable, things with them as well. When Clarence finally goes to Dioki she refuses to tell him anything about when the King will come, shouting, “I am not the king! I am not the king!” Indeed she is not, but when she throws herself on the ground amidst the hissing serpents an odd thing happens: “They were embracing her, enfolding her: and she—she was crying out. But what sort of embrace was this? Clarence could hardly believe what he saw. These were the passionate convulsions of love itself!” (p. 220). When Clarence looks away from this scene of quasi-bestiality (“quasi” because there is something suspiciously human, not altogether unconnected with Clarence himself, about those serpents), he has a glorious vision of the king, present to him somehow as a consequence of the grossly sensual lovemaking of Dioki and her serpents. Later Clarence feels “strangely shattered, strangely torn” (p. 225), as if he were … or as if he had …, “But the comparison was so unthinkable that Clarence dismissed it at once” (p. 225), and Camara Laye never quite says whether or not the vision of the King's radiance is connected with bestiality, or with voyeurism, or perhaps with a combination of the two. The two boys who brought Clarence to Dioki and then watched him with her are, however, happy to tell him that “We saw the old woman coming towards you. … She put her arms round your shoulders and pressed you against her. She. …” But Clarence, who is not sure whether he has dreamed all this and who prefers not to consider what he, the snakes, and the old woman may have done together, cuts the boys off, and the rest, which is silence, is left to the reader's imagination.

One thing, however, is certain, and that is that in going south (Dioki is of the South), in searching for the King and for the mystical union that he signifies, Clarence must open his senses and surrender them, and through them his spirit, to the lavish, exotic richness of the African forest that presses on him all around; opening himself to sensory experience specifically includes sexuality. “The perfumes, the remains of all those perfumes steal into his lungs,” as he goes southward through the womb-like, suffocating, enervating forest, “like the vapours of a poisonous bloom; they creep even lower, into his belly: and lower still, a burning, glowing, and already far from innocent commotion …” (p. 98), which makes Clarence ask the beggar, his guide, if this is the South, where he anticipates seeing the King. “‘The South is everywhere,’ the beggar said softly” (p. 98). It is indeed everywhere, Clarence finds, including his loins. “Yes, perhaps this inferno of the senses is everywhere. … He dozes; and in spite of himself the perfumes of the forest are working within him, the poisonous bloom is opening slowly … and again the green tunnel of the forest opens and swallows him up. And the sea stretches away, the musty smells of earth and the poisonous smells of flowers roll endlessly towards him, and he feels the unthinkable fire stirring again in his loins …” (pp. 98–99). The insidiously attractive and vaguely exciting, but also overripe and nauseating putrescence of the forest—and of the South—eventually smothers and crushes and splits Clarence's senses wide, making of them open wounds that fear and desire and finally require more and more of the thing that has so satiated them, numbed them, and rubbed them raw.

If taken step by step, the transition by which one passes from the religio-natural mysticism of Cheikh Hamidou Kane to the religio-natural-sexual mysticism of Camara Laye to the natural-erotic-pornographic mysticism of Yambo Ouologuem is very regular and very slight, though, reverting to an earlier matter, the first two writers might be said to subscribe more or less to the notions of négritude, while Ouologuem certainly does not. Differ as they may on négritude, however, there is an undercurrent of agreement, for the most part implicit, unstated, dramatized, among these three writers in French about the peculiar, special nature of the African experience, about how it contrasts with the European or French experience, and about what happens when the two come in contact with one another. In the “Avertissement” to Les Milles et une bibles du sexe, which is a frankly pornographic book (or “érotique” as Ouologuem prefers to call it), having explained how “Utto Rodolph”¹⁵ came to him with a manuscript of sex exploits to edit because Rodolph had imagined from reading Devoir de violence that Ouologuem would make an appropriate editor for that sort of material, Ouologuem says he agreed but that this would be his first and last excursion into this kind of literature—a kind of literature that, as practiced in its pure form by Ouologuem, is, in the language of the courts, possessed of little redeeming social value. “Et, si j'ai pris sur moi de présenter Les Mille et une bibles du sexe, c'est également parce que, en raison de certains aspects érotiques de mon premier roman, divers pays africains ont rejeté de leurs frontières Le Devoir de violence. J'étais, aux yeux de chefs d'Etats irresponsables ou incultes, j'étais, pour avoir osé dire du Nègre qu'il faisait l'amour, un cartiériste vendu à une France raciste, laquelle s'amusait de voir dénigrer par un Noir les mœurs des peuples noirs. Soit,” Ouologuem says, turning on his irresponsible and uncultivated critics. But if those critics thought Le Devoir de violence was raunchy and constituted a betrayal of the black man's cause, then—so Ouologuem seems to say—let them try Les Milles et une bibles du sexe. The vices of the white man as lovingly detailed in that book would, except for one fact pointed out in Lettre à la France nègre, make his critics blush (“Quel danger? Un Nègre saurait-il rougir?” Lettre, p. 11). Measuring his words carefully and venomously, Ouologuem delivers his tense counterattack: “Il est bon d'être primitif, certes, mais impardonnable d'être primaire. Tant pis pour les primaires qui se revent censeurs” (pp. 17–18). Someone somewhere might consider Ouologuem a “primitif” (in fact he ironically adopts that mask in his poem called “Quand parlent les dents nègres”)¹⁶ but no one anywhere could imagine him, on the evidence of his three books, to be a “primaire,” especially not in matters of “l'érotisme.”

The erotic adventures in Mille et une bibles du sexe—and this fact of setting reflects, I think, significantly on actions in Devoir de violence, which is located almost entirely in Africa—take place for the most part in France and the participants, again for the most part (when they are not dogs or other dumb beasts), are French. When the four sensualists, who momentarily sort themselves out from the swarming background of group sex and mass inter-excitation that occupies a good part of the book—Régis, Harry, Vive, and Emmanuelle (“artistes du sexe de l'érotisme,” p. 286)—set out on a safari in Africa, Ouologuem (“naïvement”) declares himself, apropos of the new setting, “désolé de voir l'Afrique mêlée à cette affaire” (p. 275). One might well discount some of Ouologuem's distress at finding Mother Africa mixed up in all this (after all, the “confessions-poker” that make up Utto Rodolph's manuscript are supposed to have been “triées, revues, corrigées et editée par Yambo Ouologuem,” which is to say he should have had a pretty free hand to do as he liked in the way of including and excluding material), but the interesting fact is that the descriptions of the sensual, the exotic, and the erotic take a rather new turn—more natural, less strained, less grotesque, and less pornographic—in Africa from what they were in France. Ouologuem goes on to give a partial explanation of his dismay and in his explanation hints at what Africa is like, in contrast to the cold climate of, for example, France:¹⁷ “J'aurais voulu qu'Utto Rodolph choisît pour décor un cadre autre—d'un exotisme moins collectif. …” Without further complaint, however, the “editor” says he set about trying to rewrite the first of the African-safari confessions, but on reading over the effort he was dissatisfied: “il manquait la dimension de la psychologie de cet érotisme là” (p. 275). Ouologuem's distress seems to come down to this lament: what is a poor pornographer to do if, in the very setting and atmosphere of his story, he discovers a super-powerful, sensual-sexual energy omnipresently flowing in the universe and expressing itself naturally in a collective exoticism-eroticism? Where is his art gone, if that which he would whip up artificially is there all the time in nature? Who, in that situation, needs the pornographer's art? To describe such a natural phenomenon is to describe something relatively normal and sane, bursting at the sensory seams perhaps, but all the same more or less robust and healthy in its expression; in short, it is to describe, or to try to describe, the African experience according to Ouologuem.

Comparatively, the forms of sex in Africa, as Ouologuem renders them in Mille et une bibles, are natural—one to one, man and woman, the ordinary appendages and orifices, no foreign instruments such as smoking guns, telephone receivers, whips, fragile crystal flutes, switch-blade knives, “godemichets,” etc. True, a lion does get into the act in Kenya, but even then the beast carries some of his nobility with him, and the passage is nothing like as depraved as the one that deals with the massive dog, the woman on a block of ice, and a crowd of voyeurists back in Paris, or the scene of Golda, Harry, the motorcycle policeman, and a hot Maserati automobile beside a French superhighway. The atmosphere of Africa that embraces the figures the moment they step from the plane seems somehow to offer promise in itself of a kind of fulfillment—the individual in relation to the surrounding, enveloping sensory universe—denied to the human creatures in the thin air of France, with their restless and frenzied, perpetually unsatisfied sensuality and their eternal greed for something new and different to revive the over-teased and weary senses. The immense age, yet tremendous richness, hence continual freshness, of everything in Africa makes unnecessary the itching search for something ever new. When the characters first arrive in Africa (Liberia), “c'était l'époque de la mousson, féconde en nuits d'apocalypse. … Or le paysage était luxuriant de baroque, avec son folklore exubérant de carmins, de bougainvilliers, d'hibiscus, d'amaryllis de vermeille, d'orchidées de formes étranges, de couleur diabolique” (p. 284). Immediately they drown themselves in the abundant fruits of nature that in their variety and plenitude render any less natural satisfaction for the senses irrelevant: “Ananas, oranges, pamplemousses, citrons, noix de cocos, fraîches ou traitées en coprah, mangues sucrées, papayes fondantes, corossols aux protubérances poilues, au goût suave et acidulé, kakis, jackfruit aux formes de courge, tout cela, ils le goûtèrent, découvrant des arbres magnifiques, l'hévéa, le plaque-minier, l'ébène, le raphia, les bambous géants, et, plus loin, le baobab et ses fruits—pain de singe au goût aigrelet” (p. 284). This is the same Africa—an enveloping sensory experience inducing a state of mind, a condition of spirit—that Clarence discovers in Radiance of the King; the same Africa, where “everything took me into the very essence of itself, as if nothing could exist except through me,” that Samba Diallo felt he had lost in coming to France in Ambiguous Adventure (p. 139). And when Ouologuem comes to describe the women of Africa—“ses femmes noires aux seins insolents, avec ses joliesses en boubous lamés et sans corsage, leur démarche canaille de nonchalance, leurs silhouettes agrémentées de laisser-aller”—he significantly does so in purely natural terms as if the women were an overflow of nature, as if nature had poured into them all her sensuous variety, her heavy, ripe vitality, her endless, rich, luscious luxuriance: “leurs fesses qui bombent au bas de leurs reins cambrés, leur sexe: crépu et électrique quand le frotte le pubis masculin, leurs poitrines: redondantes sous le soleil lourd, le robuste ouvrage de leur sensualité, née comme du climat, débordant les corps comme la volupté de cieux autres” (p. 286). With nature thus lavish, expressing herself in a superabundance of ripe fruits, human and otherwise, Africa has little need of those “parties” so frantically sought out in France: “allant de réunions d'amis (trois à six couples) au gigantisme (trois cents couples) en passant par les messes noires, les ballets roses ou bleus, les scènes de pendaison, les inventions insolites en Ardèche …” (p. 15).

Régis, who eventually comes to the fore as the central character of Bibles du sexe, and who may or may not be the same person as the fabulous “homme sans race ni contrée” (who in turn may or may not be rather closely identified with Ouologuem himself), at a certain point in the book has an odd perception of a more than personified nature while driving in the countryside: “Régis buvait le vent empli de senteurs amollisantes. Les effluves flattaient inégalement les roches aux genêts herbus et la garrigue. Le regard de la nature était à chaque virage une découverte, avec, ici un décor d'humus bleui, là un tunnel rougeoyant de ruines éventrées en entonnoir, lequel s'agrandissait, rocailleux ou étoilé de floraisons, étonnamment brun de puissance, et pré-historique. D'un coup, tout devenait démence. Féerie. Surnaturel. Vrai vagin d'air d'herbes d'algues et de roches” (p. 306). A momentary aberration of Régis' senses, one should imagine, this perception of the countryside as an immense vagina, caused no doubt by his mind's being concerned with the upcoming “party” to which he is driving. This reading of Régis' mad vision of the landscape receives some confirmation in Bound to Violence when Sankolo, who has been drugged so that his senses are entirely disordered and aberrant and who, like Clarence, has been sent on a journey ever deeper into the South, finds the experience of himself inseparable from that of nature and begins to perceive both of them in demented ways: “I ask the earth to stop moving, to let me rest without anguish, my body no longer a clenched fist in the gaping wound of the sunset. … The path turns into an immense vagina.”¹⁸ This is essentially the same mystic union, the same merger of subject and object—in Sankolo's case drug-induced—as Clarence experiences on his journey southward in Radiance of the King and again during his forest stupor and hallucinatory dream-nightmare after he reaches the South (pp. 197–205). It is also, though differently caused, essentially the same merger of subjective and objective consciousness that Samba Diallo experiences at the moment of his death in Ambiguous Adventure. In Bibles du sexe preeminently, but also here and there in Bound to Violence, the union of interior and exterior, the joining, “beyond fear and death,” of the individual with nature, realizes itself in highly erotic sexual performances. Different as lovemaking may seem from dying or rendering homage to the King, when successful it points, in Yambo Ouologuem, to the one same end as the mystic dissolution and natural reunion in Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Camara Laye—for instance, in Bibles du sexe, Harry teaching Golda, in a natural setting, the terrors of death and, beyond that, the ecstasies of erotic pleasure: “Alors, comprenant que l'homme a voulu lui façonner, par-delà la peur et la mort, l'amour du plaisir—elle laissa ses lèvres confier à la nature le délire où l'homme et la femme, à l'image du rituel des messes druidiques, se fondent dans la nature pour devenir herbe, arbre, terre ou oiseau, et en porter le nom” (p. 218).

Most readers of Bound to Violence are no doubt first and most forcibly struck not by Ouologuem's peculiar variety of mysticism but by the extremity of his expression, by the syntactic insanity and the mad brilliance of his language. From the first line (“Our eyes drink the brightness of the sun and, overcome, marvel at their tears. Mashallah! wa bismillah!”), Ouologuem seldom offers the reader any respite from the intensity of his expression, or from the intensity of his relation to the language and the relation of that language to what it describes; the reader consequently finds himself going back again and again in an effort, which usually proves vain, to discover some logical sense in Ouologuem's images, his similes and his metaphors. One might expect to encounter such difficulties of image and syntax in reading, let us say, Hopkins or Rimbaud or the Surrealist poets (with all of whom Ouologuem shows interesting similarities), but one does not expect to encounter such problems in a book that proclaims itself a prose fiction, a novel. Like Van Gogh with his paint, Ouologuem seems to want to get right inside his medium and merge with it in a kind of hot frenzy; he seems to have a need to smear himself with it, to touch and caress and violate it. Like Rimbaud and Hopkins, Ouologuem is unwilling to allow a separation of himself or his experience from the language that describes it. For a good part of Bound to Violence (especially up to the last, short chapter) language is hardly a conceptual thing at all, but rather a voluptuously and violently sensuous creature that Ouologuem treats as a living thing: he makes love to it, both tenderly and violently, he caresses and tortures and rapes it, and he often surprises the reader into sharing the same sort of relation to it.

Operating with a kind of delirious passion from within his medium, Ouologuem distorts, distends, explodes the ordinary limits of language into a succession of irrational similes, metaphors, and hyperboles. His words are related one to another not by their dictionary definitions (and the reader who goes to a dictionary to understand Ouologuem will soon find his head spinning) but in their capacity as images or as sounds or as colored, sensual things in themselves. Especially this technique, or this relation, obtains in scenes involving either eroticism or violence—or, frequently, both. The logic behind this linguistic illogic would seem to be that for either of these experiences the language of reason or of ordinary discourse is entirely inadequate, since the experiences themselves, like the mystic's vision, are neither rational nor discursive. The scene involving the Frenchman Chevalier and his black, Baudelairian mistress Awa (it is certain that Ouologuem is as thoroughly versed in Baudelaire's special blend of exotic, voluptuous sex and luxurious, repulsive-attractive putrescence as he is in Rimbaud's derangement of senses and language)—“her breasts, warm and soft as two doves of living wool”—is a nice example, and exact, of sex rearing its head (ugly or not as one likes) right through and out of the language. After Chevalier's two dogs, Dick and Médor, have done their bestial best (or worst—at any rate their most) on Awa, Chevalier takes over and, in the event, is himself taken over: “A slap from him made her bark [the proximity of the dogs perhaps?], she coiled up with pleasure, panting under his cruel caress, manipulating him like a queen or a skillful whore. Her mouth was still hungry for this man's pink, plump mollusk, and the tongue in her mouth itched to suck at the pearl of sumptuous orient that flowed, foaming as though regretfully, from the stem …” (p. 57). There is, no doubt, method in this verbal madness—which does not, however, alter the fact that it is madness. Effective though Ouologuem's pornographic description may be, it is not, one might point out, altogether realistic, neither here nor in Bibles du sexe, nor is it linguistically rational, and all that his ellipsis points serve to do is to suggest that the reader, his imagination heated up by the descriptive extravagance, should carry the scene on to that erotic end most pleasing to himself. “A flowing cup—Awa—a lavish board!” She becomes for Chevalier virtually what his medium, his language, is for Ouologuem: “An Eve with frantic loins, she cajoled the man, kissed him, bit him, scratched him, whipped him, sucked his nose ears throat, armpits navel and member so voluptuously that the administrator, discovering [like Baudelaire?] the ardent landscape of this feminine kingdom, kept her there day after day, and, his soul in ecstasy, lived a fanatical, panting, frenzied passion” (p. 57). There may be, as at least one reviewer has suggested (John Thompson in the New York Review of Books, 23 September 1971), a considerable admixture of irony here in Ouologuem's pornography, but there is also, somewhere behind the irony, a straight face: if Ouologuem were only ironic, we should not have been given Les Milles et une bibles du sexe—though admittedly it is most difficult to know, in reading Bound to Violence, when we are looking on a straight (albeit leering) face and when only on another mask.

The paradigm of this technique of doing deliberate violence to the language, of distorting syntax and disordering the senses, of jamming together images that, once coupled, result in the most irrational of similes and metaphors, comes in the description by Sankolo of his drugged and delirious hallucinations, his nightmare journey through the forest of deranged senses.

“A lion pants, he has come a long way: he stands before me. He roars, sticks out his tongue, walks away backwards and vanishes over the horizon. He perches on a treetop, turns into a superb pink panther with fiery glowing jaws, licked by flames:

“It is the sun that is setting. …

“My eyes aim at the infinite. The sun goes to sleep. It is still far away. It's afraid of falling. It's a timorous pink panther, trembling behind the dunes and the blue valleys. My headache is a barnyard. Ferocious. With its cries, its familiar sights, its sudden flapping of wings, its squawking. At the edge of the barnyard begins a desert of greenery that rasps my mucous membrane.”

(pp. 104–05)

Under the effect of this surrealistic hypertension, the senses no longer mediate between an external, objective world and interior consciousness: they become the point of frenzied merger rather than of separation, and, assaulted by an excess of sensations, they fuse everything into one indistinguishable mess—or, if one prefers, into a mystic union—of exterior fact and interior consciousness.

“The night crushes me so with its procession of indefinable sensations that I become the wind, the silence of nature, its fears, its darkness, its expectation. … I pace on springy legs. Spongy legs, my body sinks into them, I struggle to tear myself away from them. … My eyes are two round onions. Tears dance in them but never roll down my cheeks. …

“The landscape dances. My eyelashes paint it, cut it up into needles, into granite, into spurs eroded by the wind, into masses of foliage. … Swarms of twinkling sparks collapse into a hole of aching clouds, jostled and gesticulating, then rigid, stiff with fatigue.”

(p. 106)

While Sankolo's description provides the paradigm of sensory derangement and of surrealistic intensification to a supersensory level, a number of other descriptive passages operate according to the same technique: for example, the vicious subjugation of the population by the Saifs (“the Crown forced men to swallow life as a boa swallows a stinking antelope,” p. 5); the very fine description of the coupling of Kassoumi and Tambira, whose love is seen—and this is almost unique in Ouologuem—as something more tender than violent (pp. 36–43); the account of “the practice of infibulation (the sewing up of the vagina),” carried out with sadistic delight and designed to insure virginity (pp. 47–48); the description of the Saif exercising his “right of the first night” by blasting “the barrier of stitches which, luckily for Tambira, had rotted” (p. 49); Sankolo's address to his member as he delightedly, slaveringly watches a couple making love (“yes, there, taste her flesh, her real flesh, make me vomit the delight of her orgasm,” p. 91); etc., etc. It has been suggested by a number of commentators (most prominently and most often by Léopold Senghor) that African literary art is more often surrealistic than realistic, and Ouologuem implies, by the very fact and nature of his bizarre, intense, highly colored prose, that there is an emotional surrealism inherent in encounters of sex and violence to which language, if it would be adequately descriptive, must accommodate itself. We see the surrealism associated with violence for example when Wampoulo and Kratonga murder the French governor Vandame:

“Suddenly Wampoulo clasped his shoulders and shook them so frantically that Vandame's neck swung and broke.

“Quicker than speech, his arms waltzed above him, then rowed him softlier home, to the Artful Creator.

“Blood spurted from the nape of his neck like reluctant rubies grasped by a beetle. His eyeballs like frightened beads, Vandame drank a dewdrop from a blade of grass. He was a righteous man.”¹⁹

The duty of violence that provides the motive and title for Ouologuem's book is not, in passages like this, limited to false images of Africa and Africans—his subject and substance—but extends itself to include style and language as well and set ways of seeing and saying things. Only by this radical verbal and perceptual revising, Ouologuem implies, will we escape from the myths and falsifications that have arisen to surround and obscure the experience of Africa over the centuries.

This stylistic vitality in Bound to Violence, like the book's thematic insistence, is regularly achieved at the expense of both plot and characterization. Few novels are quite so poor in sequential plot (i. e., a pattern of logically and thematically consecutive events) as Bound to Violence: in so far as plot exists at all in the book it is insignificant, and this is also more or less the case with characterization. The reviewer who said of Le Devoir de violence that the “characters live and suffer and are like real living people”²⁰ could hardly have offered a more misplaced observation. Ouologuem's figures suffer all right—a suffering that is described in the most resplendent, the most astonishing, and the most baroque of language and imagery—but they are not the kind of living and lovable Dickensian characters implied by the reviewer's formulation. To return to a point made earlier, Bound to Violence is arranged to satiric ends and is largely a negative achievement, destructive and corrective; this accounts not only for the scarcity of positive, human characterization but for the disjointed and episodic organization of the book as well. What structure there is in the novel is built on repetitions, designed to show, for the “négraille” in particular, that “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” and the figures who act these repetitions out in their lives assume, as a result of treading the same paths again and again, a certain generalized, symbolic character.

The story that Ouologuem tells in a series of significant, symbolic episodes as a compressed history of Africa—each episode a repeat in essence of those which have gone before—is a tale of slavery in many and various guises, an omnipresent fact in human history: women in Bound to Violence are enslaved by men and men by their passion for women; Africans are enslaved by the false images concocted by European anthropologists and the guardians of “négritude”; Sankolo is enslaved by drugs and sex and by a pair of masters who shunt him back and forth between them as a living corpse, a “zombi”; Raymond Spartacus is enslaved by Saif ben Isaac al-Heit, who gives him the mere show of a political power that is really manipulated by Saif; and the “négraille” are enslaved by everyone—African notables and Arab traders, German ethnologists and French administrators. It is in the succession of Saifs (from the consolidation of their empire in 1202 right down to 1947) and in the relation of Saifs to the “négraille” that Ouologuem gives us his paradigm of slavery which he proceeds to conjugate and dramatize in all the separate, historical instances of the condition. Though there are other slavemasters in Bound to Violence, it is the Saifs (Ouologuem's name for the rulers of the “ancient Nakem Empire,” identified on the book-flap as “the great medieval empire of Mali,” though in details it resembles Mali less than it does the Songhay Empire—i. e., the empire around Gao that succeeded Mali) who most fully embody and express the lust to define the lives and to control the destinies of other men, as, in reverse, the “négraille” epitomize those who are defined and controlled and enslaved. In the hereditary line of manipulative, cynical, ingeniously cruel Saifs Ouologuem shows us the complete tyrant, the politician perfected, the epitome of the slavemaster, and the people on either side of this wretched story, the “négraille” or the Saifs, come to be not so much uniquely themselves as they are figures in a shared and representative destiny: they are all, psychologically and socially, symbolically and literally, either slaves or enslavers; and that, Ouologuem implies, has been the timeless division of human life in African history.

In his first two chapters, both of them short and tightly compacted (“The Legend of the Saifs” and “Ecstasy and Agony”), Ouologuem presents the grand sweep in time (1202–1901) and in space (symbolically all of Africa) that will provide the historical background and the thematic roots for the twentieth-century story that occupies the remainder of his book. “Against this background of horror,” Ouologuem says, in the griot voice he assumes in recounting the Saif's legend, “the destiny of Saif Isaac al-Heit stands out most illustriously; rising far above the common lot, it endowed the legend of the Saifs with the splendor in which the dreamers of African unity sun themselves to this day” (p. 5). But whether the story of this first and greatest of the Saifs “(God refresh his couch)” is “truth or invention” cannot now be certainly determined because “the memory of this past—glorious as it was—has survived … solely thanks to the Arab historians and to the oral tradition of the Africans” (p. 8)—all of which is legend and much of which may be myth and fantasy as well. It is to this question—the authenticity of traditional African history—that Devoir de violence addresses itself; it is an important question since “the legend of Saif Isaac al-Heit still haunts Black romanticism and the political thinking of the notables in a good many republics” (p. 8). The ingenious method in which Ouologuem probes the authenticity of the legend is to rewrite history in the voice, in the tone, and in the language of the griots and the Arab historians themselves, but of course he adopts these masks, and others, ironically so that events are seen with a twist—or two or three twists—given to their significance.

The profession of the griot is unknown in the Western world with its profusion of written documents. “En Afrique Noire,” D. T. Niane explains in Recherches sur l'empire du Mali au moyen âge,²¹ “il faut faire la distinction entre la tradition populaire, véhicule des légendes historiques, et ce que nous appellerons ‘la tradition-archives’: celle-ci pour l'Ouest Africain est détenue par ceux que l'on appelle communément ‘Griots.’ … le Griot a été le livre vivant des souverains de l'Ouest Africain.” When Ouologuem refers to “the oral tradition of the Africans,” and when he orally reconstructs the history of Africa, it is in both these traditions, popular and archivist, that he is working. An excellent example of the popular tradition, too long to reproduce here but stunningly like what Ouologuem describes at the beginning of Devoir de violence, is to be found in Boubou Hama's three-volume autobiography called Kotia-Nima²² Boubou Hama says that in the evenings he and the other children of the family listened, “suspendus à ses lèvres,” to their grandmother—not a griot in any professional sense, but a family elder—as she told the stories of their people. “Elle nous exposait le système de l'univers sonraï [i. e., Songhay]. Elle nous enseignait la mystique africaine” (I, 13). More particularly, however, “Diollo Birma nous enseignait aussi l'histoire du village” (p. 14), and it is this account, covering seven pages of text, that resembles so strikingly, in spirit and in detail, the history in “The Legend of the Saifs” and “Ecstasy and Agony” (in fact, Diollo Birma's story refers several times to warriors from Bandiagara, Ouologuem's home village, to whom she gives the title “Sofa”—cf. Ouologuem's “Saif”). On the evidence of Devoir de violence, it seems more than likely that as a child Ouologuem, like Boubou Hama, heard such stories as he tells (and perhaps heightens a bit) in his novel—stories that would have been, again as with Boubou Hama, presented as family history, as village history, as the history of the people, Songhay or Dogon, and that the child when grown up might imagine as the symbolic history of Africa.

In addition to this popular tradition, there is much also of the professional griot in Bound to Violence. The history of Saif Isaac al-Heit, for example, is apparently modelled on the life of Sundiata Keita,²³ the ruler who first unified and solidified the Empire of Mali, as that life is recorded in Sundiata by D. T. Niane from the lips of a present-day griot, Mamoudou Kouyaté, who begins his story with pride: “I am a griot. It is I, Djeli Mamoudou Kouyaté, son of Bintou Kouyaté and Djeli Kedian Kouyaté, master in the art of eloquence” (p. 1). Robert Pageard's praise of Niane's achievement in the Sundiata—he has, Pageard says, reproduced “l'autorité, la superbe, la fertilité imaginative du griot”—fits Ouologuem's achievement equally well, and what Pageard goes on to say seems more applicable to what Ouologuem does in Devoir de violence than to Niane in Sundiata: “D. T. Niane ne se contente pas de traduit fidèlement … le récit, plein de merveilleux, du griot traditionalist: il l'illustre, de sa connaissance intime de l'Afrique contemporaine, utilise les données de l'histoire et de la géographie, enrichit la légende de ses observations personnelles. Il fait ainsi œuvre d'historien autant que d'artiste.”²⁴ Ouologuem's fidelity to the griot tradition is, of course, heavily qualified since, in adopting the griot mask, he shows an ironic attitude both toward the manner of the griot and toward his subject; but then there is more than one traditional tone for the griot, and Ouologuem might be seen, even in his grotesque humor and his mad mockery, to be following one of those traditions. “On appelle du terme générique de griots,” according to Bokar N'Diayé in his discussion of the griot caste, “les musiciens, chroniqueurs, généalogistes et pitres [i. e., clowns, buffoons] qu'on rencontre dans toutes les sociétés africains et en particulier au Mali.”²⁵ That Ouologuem is speaking through the masks of musician, chronicler, genealogist, and buffoon, of historian, poet, and story-teller (“les Griots … sont, en même temps, historiologues, poètes et conteurs”),²⁶ does not make it any easier for the reader to pin down the historic reality behind the fabulous myth or even to determine exactly what Ouologuem, as a revisionist historian, takes to be the reality.

To complete the sources for his legendary history of Nakem, and to confuse somewhat more the reader bewildered already by the many different masks and the various possible reconstructions of history, Ouologuem turns to the histories of the Songhay Empire written by Arab historians, with their overlay of Islamic fatalism, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Tarikh el-Fettach and the Tarikh es-Soudan,²⁷ both mentioned in Devoir de violence—these too are versions of African history, constructs rising out of the African experience, and it is in the confluence of the Arab histories, the extended-family and village traditions, and the griot legends that Devoir de violence finds its complex and distinctive voice, always, because Ouologuem is primarily a satirist, exercised at an ironic pitch. “Parmi ceux qui firent cette déclaration à son sujet,” we are told in the Tarikh el-Fettach, “il convient de citer le cheikh Abderrahman Es-Soyoûti, le cheikh Mohammed ben Abdelkerîm El-Meghîli, le cheikh Chamharoûch de la race des génies et le chérif hassanide Moulaï El-Abbâs, prince de la Mecque: Dieu leur fasse miséricorde à tous!” (p. 15). Ouologuem too, looking momentarily out from the mask of Arab historian, invokes the same god in the same terms, though not, perhaps, with quite the same sincerity, in his description of Isaac al-Heit's triumphs in Devoir de violence, and he incidentally helps himself at the same time to every one of the exotic and colorful names preceding the invocation: “Tour à tour, redoutable, il défit les Berbères, les Maures et les Touareg, reconnut le cheikh Abderrahman Es Soyoûti, secourut le cheikh Mohammed ben Abdelkerîm El-Meghîli, le cheikh Chamharoûch de la race des Génies, et le chérif hassanide Moulaï El-Abbâs, prince de la Mecque: Dieu leur fasse miséricorde à tous” (p. 13).

This stylistic pastiche, which combines elements from the historical traditions of family and village, from griot “archives,” and from Arab chronicles, is matched in Bound to Violence by a geographical and cultural pastiche, the elements of which Ouologuem draws from all over Africa; here again he freely mixes the real with the imaginary and the historic with the mythic to produce a new historic amalgam with a new interpretation. The population of the Nakem Empire, Ouologuem says, near the beginning of the book, was formed into “groups of varying sizes, separated from one another by all manner of tribes—Radingues, Fulani, Gonda, nomadic Berbers, Ngodo” (p. 4); later these people, “scattered over the savannas bordering on Equatorial Africa,” suffered, he tells us, from “the raids of the Masai, the Zulus, the Jaga” (p. 13). The “savannas bordering on Equatorial Africa” are inhabited by many different peoples—but not by the Zulus, who are in South Africa, and if Ouologuem's savannas are in West Africa, as I assume they are, then not by the Masai or the Jaga either (both are situated in Kenya); nor does any place in Africa know the Radingues, the Gonda, or the Ngodo. The Fulani, however, and the nomadic Berbers, like the Tukulör and the Tuareg, mentioned elsewhere (pp. 9 and 10), are real peoples and do, in fact, inhabit the savannas in West Africa (with the Berbers going farther north into the “bitter deserts” and into North Africa). Moreover, the name “Gonda” is not far removed from “Donga,” and “Ngodo” looks like a rearrangement of the letters in “Dogon”—which brings us back to the author of the book, who, according to the book-flap, is “the descendant of a Dogon family.” Mixing together the real, the imaginary that carries an echo of the real, and the purely imaginary, Ouologuem brings the reader step by step from a verifiable history that no one can deny to an acceptance of Ouologuem's personal vision, or revision, of the African experience. Just as he takes names from the Tarikh el-Fettach and throws them together with names of his own fabrication, so Ouologuem mixes historic fact, imaginative fiction, and apocalyptic vision into a maddening blend that calls up echoes from African history in the reader's mind, tantalizing half-identifications that tempt him to find all this on a map and in ancient chronicles, and that lead him in the end to accept, more or less, Ouologuem's drastic and imaginative revision of history. And by bringing peoples from South Africa, from East Africa, from North Africa, from West Africa, and from imaginary Africa to play a part in his drama, Ouologuem expands the significance of local history to a continental circumference. Le Devoir de violence is thus not the private autobiography of an individual, nor the representative autobiography of a people, but the symbolic autobiography of a continent.

The history of Africa, according to Ouologuem, as far back as the historian can see and right up to the present moment of independence, has been dominated by the fact of slavery—blacks enslaving blacks, Arabs enslaving blacks, whites enslaving blacks—nor will the African future produce anything different, he suggests, until those involved acknowledge the unpleasant realities of the past. “Après tout,” Ouologuem asks rhetorically in his Lettre à la France nègre, “quel Africain ignore qu'avant l'Homme Blanc, il y eut également le colonialisme des Notables noirs et celui de la Conquête arabe?” (p. 90). And to simplify the subject matter of his “Lettre aux non-racistes” in the same book, he undertakes to describe the interior of Africa “avant l'Homme Blanc.” In those distant times, he says (and the situation is not much different now: it has only taken on a new color), there were no French around, there was no middle class and no working class, there was only the Saif and the “négraille,” only the enslaver and the enslaved, only “les intelligents” and “les crétins”: “il n'y avait que des empires et des empereurs, et point de prolétaires à l'horizon. Ça et là se dressaient quelques hommes, des individus. … Le reste était une forêt vierge de peuplades enchevetrées et indéfrisables: les crétins. A coté de ces crétins, il y avait les intelligents qui vendaient les crétins—grassement—sur les côtes” (p. 61). Ouologuem would have his reader recognize, as his Lettre and Bound to Violence demonstrate, that there are many kinds of slavery—economic, literary, philosophical, and, especially, psychological—besides the relatively vulgar form of slavery that is physical. The African today, according to Ouologuem, is more likely to be enslaved by false images and by economics than by chains; his freedom will come only in destroying those images and in seeing that slavery has less to do with color than with exploitation.

Fritz Shrobenius, the German anthropologist in Bound to Violence, an idiot but also crafty in his own way, cranks out, with the connivance of Saif and his son, a load of false philosophical and artistic images of Africa that prove immensely profitable to him (thus the economics) if not to the Africans, who are betrayed more deeply into slavery by these very images of their own lavishly proclaimed past glory. “The true face of Africa,” Shrobenius tells his dupes in Europe, is to be found in the ancient Empire of Nakem, “a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity, order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it is here that we must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization.”²⁸ Saif and his son, “reeling off spirituality by the yard” (p. 87), keep Shrobenius supplied with the fake artifacts and the equally fake “magico-religious, cosmological, and mythical symbolism” (p. 95) that will simultaneously astound Europe and delight the “négraille” while plunging the latter ever deeper into misery. “Thus drooling, Shrobenius … mystified the people of his own country who in their enthusiasm raised him to a lofty Sorbonnical chair, while on the other hand he exploited the sentimentality of the coons, only too pleased to hear from the mouth of a white man that Africa was ‘the womb of the world and the cradle of civilization.’ … O Lord, a tear for the childlike good nature of the niggertrash! Have pity, O Lord! … Makari! makari!” (pp. 94–95). This is only one of the false images of Africa—there are more, many more—that, Ouologuem claims, enslave the African and to which the African, Ouologuem, and his reader all owe a duty of violence. In his novel Ouologuem performs his duty by rubbing the noses of these fantasies in the dirt of historic reality so that the African nation may know itself: what it has really been and who has really made it as it is. The new image, ironically, shows a pan-African unity too, not, however, a unity, as Cheikh Anta Diop and Kwame Nkrumah would have it, born of brotherhood and compassion and family love extended to the limits of the continent, but one born of greed and political guile, of hypocrisy and violence, of the relation between the man enslaved and the man who enslaves.

In “Dawn,” the final section of Bound to Violence, Ouologuem once more changes his mask, his style and literary form, to give his reader a philosophic overview of the symbolic history enacted in the seven hundred and fifty years of the Nakem Empire. From the griot epic of the first two sections, passing through the novelistic treatment of the present in the long third section (“The Night of the Giants”), Ouologuem finally arrives at the philosophic dialogue that constitutes the final section and that provides commentary on the drama that has transpired in the preceding pages. Before Bishop Henry, the Christian apologist, and Saif ben Isaac al-Heit, Saif of Saifs, the most cunning, cynical, and tyrannical in the whole line of Saifs, settle down to their game of chess, which sums up Nakem history, and to their philosophic dialogue, which comments on that history, Bishop Henry tells Saif a story that is like a compressed image of the entire book. He says he wandered into a movie house where they were showing a picture based on the history of Nakem. At first he could not grasp what was going on, except that there was some plot or some plan and also much violence. Then he came to see that if he could understand the nature of violence itself, if he could understand the principle animating all this action, he would not need to follow any consecutive plot, for every act would be, in its own way, a manifestation of the one same principle. And so in Bound to Violence, once the reader has the key, the understanding of slavery everywhere and always, the history of Nakem, an epitome of the history of all Africa, falls into place, allowing the reader to enter the history anywhere—beginning, middle, or end—and still comprehend its significance, just as Bishop Henry comes in in the middle of the picture but picks out the principle that explains.

The philosophic contest between Bishop Henry, the man of religion, and Saif, the man of politics, assumes the form, as Gerald Moore has pointed out,²⁹ of a dialogue about freedom, taking, for historical text and as the symbolic case, the seven-hundred-and-fifty-year experience of Nakem-Ziuko: freedom—what it is, who has it, how it is won and how it is limited or lost. In their dialogue as in their chess game, and as also in this whole novel, they play out the history of Nakem, in which the reader, like Ouologuem, tries to see the face of the future of Africa: “the legend of the Saifs, a legend in which the future seems to seek itself in the night of time …” (p. 167). It is a profoundly sad conclusion to which Ouologuem comes—relieved only by the intensity, the energy, the brilliance of his coming to that conclusion—since the future finds itself in history and the history of Africa is synonymous with the legend of the Saifs. In the Sundiata Mamoudou Kouyaté says, “We griots are depositaries of the knowledge of the past. But whoever knows the history of a country can read its future” (p. 41), and Ouologuem agrees that is all too true. “Often,” he says, as Bishop Henry and Saif continue into the African night their game inspired by love and politics, “the soul desires to dream the echo of happiness, an echo that has no past” (p. 181). The soul desires to and it does, deluding itself with visions of glory because it has not wanted to look into history, has not been willing to understand what the past is, or that the past continues to live in the present; it deludes itself, Ouologuem says scornfully, with a mere echo, a sound reverberating with such phrases as “Pan-Africa” and “African unity” (p. 5). “But projected into the world,” Ouologuem goes on, “one cannot help recalling that Saif, mourned three million times, is forever reborn to history beneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics” (pp. 181–82). With that reflection, both ironic and melancholy, Ouologuem brings to a close his symbolic autobiography of the African people and the African continent, where, according to his vision, a history of continuous and surpassing human cruelty has been enacted in a setting of almost infinite natural sensuality.

Notes

1. Africa: A Subjective View (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1964), p. 78.

2. “Entretien avec Chinua Achebe,” Afrique, No. 27 (octobre 1963), p. 42.

3. “Provisional Notes on Literature and Criticism in Africa,” Présence Africaine, NS No. 78 (2d Quarter 1971), p. 141.

4. Le Devoir de violence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968); Bound to Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). A small scandal blew up, in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere, around Le Devoir de violence. The TLS of 5 May 1972 printed, in parallel columns, about one page from Ouologuem's novel and a page from Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield, and no doubt the similarity, amounting to identity, between the two texts justifies the tone of smug self-satisfaction in the TLS note. Why Ouologuem should have chosen to transfer the passage from Greene's book to his own is hard to explain since it is unremarkable enough in its original context and out of place, out of style, and out of character in Ouologuem's book (though the pornography that immediately follows is strictly in character). However, this is not the only aspect of Ouologuem's practice that is difficult to understand or explain: he is a very peculiar writer and, one gathers, a very peculiar man.

   Eric Sellin, in “Ouologuem's Blueprint for Le Devoir de violence” (Research in African Literatures, 2 [Fall 1971], pp. 117–20), points out structural similarities between Ouologuem's book and André Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des Justes and calls into question the originality if not the authenticity of Ouologuem's novel. What is more interesting than the structure of Ouologuem's book, however, as I hope to demonstrate in the analysis that follows, is its extraordinary style, and the parallel passages quoted by Sellin to make his point are most remarkable for their stylistic differences—as also Ouologuem's essential style is different throughout from Graham Greene's typical style. I am not at all sure that anyone has got to the bottom of Ouologuem yet, but I feel certain that he is a stranger and more bizarre—and more brilliant—writer than the TLS or Eric Sellin understand in their admonitory smugness.

   Robert McDonald offers a rehash of the Graham Greene business, but without providing much illumination or any new insights, in “Bound to Violence: A Case of Plagiarism,” Transition, No. 41 (1972), pp. 64–68.

5. Interview with Mel Watkins published in N. Y. Times Book Review, 7 March 1971, p. 7.

6. Lettre à la France nègre (Paris: Éditions Edmond Nalis, 1968), p. 189.

7. “Malian Prizewinner,” West Africa, No. 2689 (December 14, 1968), p. 1,474.

8. Reprinted as “Remarks on Négritude” in African Writing Today, ed. Ezekiel Mphahlele (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967), p. 252.

9. This, like many other verbal echoes, indicates the intimate relation between Devoir de violence and Lettre à la France nègre: on p. 9 of the former, Ouologuem refers to “sa population, baptisée dans le supplice”; on p. 190 of the latter, he describes “ce continent, baptisé dans le supplice.”

10. Les Milles et une bibles du sexe (Paris: Éditions du Dauphin, 1969), p. 78.

11. Lettre, pp. 191 and 192. It is difficult to be certain what the relation between Ouologuem's Lettre and Devoir de violence might be, but they were obviously written in close conjunction with one another (and both were published in 1968), so much so that phrases, lines, and paragraphs are virtually repeated in the two books. According to the interview in West Africa, Devoir de violence was originally a thousand pages long, or about five times the length of the published version. It seems likely that Lettre is composed of fragments that would not quite fit the fictional plan of Devoir and, rather than lose some choice items, Ouologuem put them together as another book (Lettre is notably fragmentary and loose-jointed, extremely various in tone, in technique, and in its effects). On p. 189 of Devoir, for example, Ouologuem refers to the “négrophilie philistine, sans obligation ni sanction, homologue des messianismes populaires, qui chantent à l'ame blanche allant à la négraille telle sa main a Y'a bon, Banania” and on, coincidentally, the same page (189) in Lettre, he describes “ceux-la … qui s'insurgeaient en philistins d'une négrophilie sans obligation ni sanction.” He refers again to the “philistine négrophiles” in the interview in West Africa (p. 1475).

12. Robert Pageard, Littérature négro-africaine (Paris: Le livre africain, 1966), p. 87.

13. Ambiguous Adventure, trans. Katherine Woods, preface by Vincent Monteil (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1969), p. ix.

14. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.431 and 6.4311.

15. The book claims to be by “Utto Rodolph” (the name, in an apparent fit of forgetfulness, is spelled “Rudolf” throughout the “Avertissement”), who is described as “un grand aristocrate parisien” and a “personnalité fort connue” (p. 13). In their Bibliography of Creative African Writing, Janheinz Jahn and Claus Peter Dressler list “Utto Rodolph” simply as a pseudonym for Ouologuem, which is no doubt the real relation obtaining between the two; at any rate, in my discussion of the book, and in relating it to Bound to Violence, I have assumed that “Utto Rodolph” is one of Ouologuem's many masks.

16. “Quand parlent les dents nègres” was first published under the title “1901” in Présence Africaine, NS No. 51 (3e trimestre 1964), pp. 99–100; under the revised title it was published with five other poems by Ouologuem in Nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noire, a special number of Présence Africaine, NS No. 57 (1er trimestre 1966), pp. 88–95. The poem is also in Modern Poetry from Africa, ed. Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), pp. 75–76, with the title “When Negro Teeth Speak.”

17. England and the English, naturally, are even further removed than France and the French from the “exotisme … collectif” of Africa. Golda, after she has been drawn out of her frigidity and has been introduced to almost every known variety of sensual experience (and to a few varieties heretofore unknown), takes on many lovers but prefers to avoid the sensually dead English: “Elle fut courtisée, aimée et prise par divers amis de rencontre, elle évita systématiquement les Anglais—parce qu'ils se lavaient les mains avant de faire l'amour, frappaient à la porte, toussotaient, ouvraient, entraient, la pénétraient à peine, et satisfaits, rentraient chez eux” (p. 230).

18. Bound to Violence, p. 105. In the original “the gaping wound” is “la plaie béante.” In Bibles du sexe, Ouologuem's strange imagination often conceives of the vagina as a wound, gaping, sweet, or pulpy—“la plaie pulpeuse” (p. 227), for example—a conception that is made graphic in certain of the drawings illustrating the text.

19. P. 115. The account of Vandame's death is entirely different in the French original. After playing a game of William Tell, shooting at a crumpled-up paper on Vandame's head, Kratonga finishes him: “Kratonga visa de nouveau. Le pistolet aboya. Un petit trou, rond, apparut sur le front du gouverneur, près du sourcil droit, à la naissance de la racine nasale. Ses yeux s'entrouvrirent, le rapport glissa à terre, il fit un pas pour se relever, comme s'il voulait tenter de s'enfuir. Puis il s'affala doucement, et, un instant raide, tournoya sur lui-même, bavant contre le sable et tombant à la renverse, sur le ventre. Ses pieds raclèrent le roc, on entendit des borborygmes sortir du fond de sa gorge, puis ses poumons se vidèrent en un long rale saccadé. C'était un juste” (p. 133). (This change in the way in which Vandame dies leads to a minor discrepancy in the English version: the pistol that is placed near Vandame's body in both versions to explain his death works well enough in the French but could hardly account for the broken neck in the English.) I am assured that Ouologuem himself rewrote the passage after the translation was done and that he made several other small changes after reading the translation. This is the justification for doing a stylistic analysis of writing in translation: Ouologuem satisfied himself as much with the version in English as with the version in French.

    In this same general passage—but only in the English, not in the French—Ouologuem introduced into the translation a number of apparent allusions to English and American literature (some of which remain as inexplicable as his borrowing from Graham Greene): “the awful daring of a moment's surrender. … Then blood shook his heart” (Waste Land); “There was no end, only addition” (Four Quartets); “because he could not stop for death” (Emily Dickinson). These make little sense in Ouologuem's text—especially the Emily Dickinson—but they provide another instance of the oddity and inexplicability of his writing practice.

20. Hans Maes-Jelinek, in African Literature Today, No. 4 (1970), p. 55.

21. Djibril Tamsir Niane, Recherches sur l'empire du Mali au moyen âge (Conakry: République de Guinée, Ministère de l'Information et du Tourisme, 1962), p. 5.

22. Boubou Hama, Kotia-Nima, 3 vols. (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1968–1969), I, 13–20.

23. D. T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. D. Pickett (London: Longmans, 1965).

24. Robert Pageard, “Soundiata Keita et la tradition orale,” Présence Africaine, NS No. 35 (1er trimestre 1961), p. 51.

25. Bokar N'Diayé, Les castes au Mali (Bamako: Éditions Populaires, 1970), p. 87.

26. Léopold Senghor, Liberté I (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), p. 207.

27. These are both available in French translations from the turn of the century: Tarikh el-Fettach, ou Chronique du chercheur …, “par Mahmoüd Kati ben El-Hadj El-Motaouakkel Kâti et l'un de ses petitfils,” traduction française par O. Houdas et M. Delafosse (Paris: Librairie d'Amérique et d'Orient, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1964 [photographic reproduction “de l'édition originale datée de 1913–1914”]); and Tarikh es-Soudan, “par Abderrahman ben Abdallah ben 'Imran ben 'Amir es-Sa'di,” traduit de l'Arabe par O. Houdas (Paris: Librairie d'Amérique et d'Orient, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1964 [“reproduction photographique de l'édition original datée de 1898–1900”]).

28. P. 94. Shrobenius, as various reviewers have pointed out, is obviously based on Leo Frobenius, the German Africanist of the beginning of this century (Shrobenius arrives in Nakem in 1910). The phrasing of this quotation, however, suggests that Ouologuem is stalking some black game in addition to Frobenius. Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese anthropologist-cum-historian-cum-philosopher, in L'unité culturelle de l'Afrique Noire, divides all human history and culture into the “southern cradle” and the “northern cradle,” “le berceau Méridional” and “le berceau Nordique,” and ancient Egypt, he says, was the direct ancestor of black African culture. “Dans le domaine moral,” Diop says of his southern and Egyptian cradle, there is “un idéal de paix, de justice, de bonté, un optimisme que élimine toute notion de culpabilité ou de péché originel dans les créations et métaphysique” (L'unité culturelle de l'Afrique Noire [Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959], p. 185). In the northern cradle, on the other hand, a simple and total opposite reigns: “Un idéal de guerre, de violence, de crime, de conquête hérité de la vie nomade avec comme corollaire un sentiment de culpabilité on de péché originel qui fait batir des systèmes religieux ou métaphysique pessimistes …” (ibid.). Ouologuem might agree about the vices of the northern cradle, but he makes deliberate mockery of Diop and others like him who, as he feels, delude themselves, and try to delude others, with négritude nonsense about a perfect African past of peace, justice, goodness, wisdom, beauty, etc. They all, Ouologuem implies, like Shrobenius, have private reasons for serving up this glorious foolishness.

29. “Action and Freedom in Two African Novels,” The Conch, 2 (March 1970), pp. 21–28.