SOURCE: “Chess and Sex in Le Devoir de violence,” in Callaloo, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 216-32.

[In the following essay, Philipson studies the parallels between Le Devoir de violence and the game of chess.]

“It's a great huge game of chess that's being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

autobiography—Chess for me has always connoted the invincibility of the father. When I was little, my father taught me chess, and we played often. I've always believed that my father is something of a genius in spheres where logic holds sway—he is an organic chemist by profession—and his ability in chess and bridge only confirms that assumption. As a child, I was never able to beat my father at chess, even though he would give me the advantage of a knight or rook or sometimes even the queen. (I didn't like that because losing to an opponent who had no queen was particularly humiliating.) My father is a kind and gentle man: he took no pride in beating his son. But his seemingly endless series of losses eventually filled me with disgust for the game. I haven't played chess in twenty years. My father is now sixty-seven, still a vigorous and active man. If we were to play a game of chess now and I were to beat him, I would be more upset than if we had once more rehearsed the scene of my Oedipal failure.

battre quelqu'un aux échecs—In French as well as English, you can “win a game” (where the direct object is inanimate) or you can “beat an opponent” (where the direct object is possessed of intelligence, even if it is the artificial intelligence of a computer). In both languages “win” can be used intransivitively, “j'ai gagné,” but not “beat.” You must beat an opponent, and in both languages the verb has associated meanings of physical violence.

games and play—Johan Huizinga writes, “[P]lay is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life.’”¹ This definition doesn't account for self-directed play. Here there are no rules, as one is not playing against an opponent. What rules are involved in solitary sports such as swimming, running, or even taking a walk? It is no accident that masturbation is also called “playing with yourself.” Must play involve an opponent?—for that is where the necessity of rules comes in. What are the rules of sex—or is that also not play?

Games, however, conform nicely to Huizinga's definition of play. Here the rules are, indeed, “absolutely binding.”

Saïf: Vous voyez … il y a trop de contrainte.

HENRY: Forcément, sourit-il, c'est un jeu; et il ajouta d'une voix différante: et qui a ses régles.

Saïf: C'est qu'il n'y a pas de choix.

HENRY: Si! Vous devenez libre parce que vous n'avez pas le choix.²

j'adoube—In a particularly strict game, once a player has touched his piece, he is committed to move it. Chess and tag are two games where touch is rigidly hypostatized as will. But what a difference between these two acts of touching: it is like comparing the Catholic presentation of the host to a simchas torah dance. The only exception to the above rule is if the player says “J'adoube” [“I adjust”] as he touches his piece. This is what Austin would call a performative speech-act, except that its purpose is not to accomplish an act through ritualized speech (e. g., “I now pronounce you man and wife”) but to void the action of its hypostatized intention. How well this phrase would serve us in both love and art. Alas, the writer cannot pen in the middle of his text, “J'adoube.”

chess mates—Chess is always a form of stylized agon, but the context in which the game is played invests the struggle with a range of different meanings. When Bobby Fisher played Boris Spassky, chess became another battlefield in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. In Shakespeare's Tempest, however, chess provides cultural sublimation for the geo-political contest for territory and power. Caliban's comic attempt to overthrow Prospero with the help of Stephano and Trinculo shows how deeply ingrained the desire for dominance and rule lies within man's animal nature. And it was because Prospero was originally so blind to this truth that he allowed his position to be usurped by Antonio.

I thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind—
With that which, but by being so retired,
O'erprized all popular rate, in my false brother
Awaked an evil nature, and my trust
Like a good parent, did beget of him
A falsehood in its contrary as great
As my trust was, which had indeed no limit
A confidence sans bound.

(I. ii. 89–97)

In the nature vs. culture axis around which much of The Tempest's meaning ranges itself, disorder springs from rightful authority overlooking the presence of baser instincts. It is not a mistake that Prospero repeats. This history gives special weight to Prospero's injunction to Ferdinand not to “break [Miranda's] virgin knot before / All sanctimonious ceremonies may / With full and holy rite be minist'red” (IV. i. 14–16). When he sends Ferdinand and Miranda to his cell in order to quell Caliban's plot and to bring the others to his power, the betrothed couple are alone and in privacy for the first time. Yet rather than succumb to what Ferdinand calls “our worser genius” (IV. i. 27), the noble pair play chess instead, a sublimation of animal nature, which is also linked to political aggression.

Miranda: Sweet lord, you play me false.

Ferdinand: No, my dearest love, I would not for the world.

Miranda: Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, And I would call it fair play.

(V. i. 171–174)

“a battle to the death”—Is chess then only a form of stylized battle, a striving to win? Heidegger reminds us that we falsify the nature of striving if we confound it with discord and dispute and thus see it only as disorder and destruction. “In essential striving, rather, the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their natures. Self-assertion of nature, however, is never a rigid insistence upon some contingent state, but surrender to the concealed originality of the source of one's own being. In the struggle, each opponent carries the other beyond itself. Thus the striving becomes ever more intense as striving, and more authentically what it is.”³

In the final section of Le Devoir de violence two battles take place: the rhetorical struggle for Henry's life (which he wins in true Christian manner only by renouncing his desire for life) and the chess game itself. The rhetorical struggle is also a game, for Henry is aware of Saïf's plan to kill him. Using the metaphors of games and rules, Henry lets Saïf know that he sees through him, that, in fact, he imitates him. Like Saïf, Henry plays the rhetorical game, pretending that he doesn't know about the poisonous asp that Saïf has placed in the bamboo cylinder. Everything about the advice that Henry “theoretically” gives to Saïf not only reveals Saïf's consistent strategy in the face of French colonization but also describes Henry's similar strategy in the political (life-or-death) context of his discourse.

—Mais attention au jeu d'autrui, insista Henry, souriant du même sourire entendu à Saïf. Il faut le reconnaître et vouloir s'y reconnaître. Dites-vous, poursuivit-il à doubles sens: Je veux jouer comme s'ils ne me voyaient pas jouer, me mettant au jour sans scandale, d'accord avec moi et avec eux en apparence, usant de leur ruse sans jamais avoir l'air de la forcer ni de la détourner, démêlent ce piège embrouillé, et encore avec prudence, ne touchant à rien sans avoir su ce après quoi il tient. Hors cette prudence, mon cher, peut-on tuer l'autre … au jeu?

(202–3).

But the game is only begun after Saïf has renounced his assassination attempt and reveals not the confrontation of two civilizations sublimated through chess but the harmony of thought between two exemplary figures. The game itself is preceeded by the narrative parenthesis: “Les deux hommes alors se regardèrent, se souriant, et, pour la première fois, acceptèrent de parler le même langage” (206).

freedom and constraint—When opponents agree to play by a set of rules, they “speak” (or act) the same language. The rules of chess are well understood, and they have even given rise to conceptual signifiers (words) which have become metaphors in other spheres: “checkmate,” “gambit,” “end game.” These rules are rigid and unswerving. A player is neither free to move a rook diagonally nor to retreat with a pawn. Yet for all practical purposes, an infinite number of chess games can be generated from a finite, rather small, number of rules. Without these rules, chess could not exist as a game. The affinity of this observation with the structuralist view of language is obvious and extends to transformational grammar. Each language has its own set of rules, which may be finite but can generate an infinite number of meaningful utterances.

Freedom lies not in chaos but in a masterful manipulation of the rules. There is, however, a political dimension in game playing that seems absent in the “grammar” of language: guile. In the conversation that precedes their chess game, Henry tells Saïf that the very essence of the game of diplomacy is to replace force by guile. When Saïf claims, mendaciously, that he does not know how to use trickery, Henry, equally ingenuous, replies, “Vous avez tort de ne pas ruser” (203).

“Ruser?” s'étonna Saïf avec circonspection …

“C'est-à-dire être libre, repondit Henry. L'idée de la liberté n'est pas une idée simple. Elle se métamorphose. Tout comme la structure du jeu. Il y a des moments de la même idée. Une idée prise à une moment quelconque de son mouvement doit se réveler par ce en quoi consiste sa définition. Les hommes se croient libres au moment où il y a la loi reconnue et énoncée. Jouez! je vous dirai les régles. Vous existerez.”

(204)

It is, of course, Henry the European who generously offers to tell Saïf the rules.

character and actant—Although the concept of “character” is an old staple in Western literary criticism, structuralism popularized in the concept of “actant.” Actants are members of the dramatis personae who are defined not by their personality traits (Quixotic, Byronic, pragmatic, pedantic) but by the functions that belong to them in the syntagm of the storyline. In his analysis of the folktale, Vladimir Propp lists seven actantial categories: the villain, the hero, the dispatcher, the sought-for person (usually the princess) and her father, the donor, the helper, and the false hero.⁴ To speak of an actant is to look at the character's function in the structure of the text rather than discussing him, her, or it in the psychologizing terms of “character analysis.” In actantial analysis, both Miss Tita in “The Aspern Papers” and Ariel in The Tempest fall into the category of “helper” no matter how otherwise divergent they might be in personality traits.

The novel is a genre singularly resistant to actantial analysis, Greimas and Brémond notwithstanding. If Le Devoir de violence seems to have an easily identifiable villain in Saïf, who is the hero? Raymond? Henry? Even if such a reductionist analysis of the novel were possible, how helpful would it be?

Chess pieces, however, are much closer to actants in their invariable functions than to characters. Lewis Carroll plays upon this opposition between the necessity of function and the arbitrary nature of character in Through the Looking Glass. The Red Queen and the White Queen are as different in their personalities as they are in color, even though they fulfill the same function vis-à-vis chess strategy. The White Queen is slow and gentle, somewhat woozy; the Red Queen is sharp and imperious. Other memorable characters are the White King and the White Knight.

kings, queens, and sexuality—In the ideology of chess, kings have no sexuality. This accounts for the limitations of their movements; they can only go one square at a time. What we have here is an idealization of kingship, one that sees kings as hieratic actants and not as libidinized characters. Louis XIV's famous dictum—L'ètat c'est moi!—takes on an entirely new dimension here. This hierocratic ideology surfaces in Le Devoir de violence as well. Saïf does his best to drape himself in sacerdotal splendor during the ceremony of submission (41–42). As the Black and White “kings” of the final confrontation, neither Saïf nor Henry is invested with sexuality. (It is true that Saïf has a large harem, but his sexual nature is not revealed in the narrative. The bishop, of course, is ideologically committed to celibacy. Given the unblushing discussion of sexuality that pervades much of the rest of the book, one might assume that the narrative is not turning away from this subject out of prudery.)

Queens, on the other hand, have the greatest freedom of movement of any of the chess pieces. As the queen is the only female figure on the board, she carries within her figure all phallocratic conceptions of a generalized female nature. Thus, the queen's freedom of movement may be fairly equated with a rampant and all-devouring sexuality. The chess queen is, etymologically, a virago: a strong, manlike woman, the most powerful piece on the board. In phallocentric ideology, out of which issues the game of chess, the king is a ruler of no sexuality but upon whom the whole game depends; the queen is an insatiable sex-maniac fortunately allied to the interests of the king. Ouologuem, the complete phallocrat, allows no one the role of queen in his novel. His women are usually sexual objects or victims of barbarism, frequently both.

the “invitation” to play—When Henry asks Saïf if he has a game of chess, the hereditary ruler of Nakem is “manifestly disappointed.”

“Je croyais que vous me compreniez, dit'il. J'en étais même persuadé” (202).

But Henry does understand Saïf, and he uses chess as the metaphor for Nakem's history under the colonialism of the French.

“Mais voyez! les carrés, la ligne des pions que se dressent comme autant de fantassins dans la nuit Nakem, les deux fous tels Chevalier et Vandame, les Deux cavaliers, Kratonga et Wampoulo, les deux tours Kassoumi et Bourémi. Voyez! la reine, tenez! est le plus puissant atout: elle va dans toutes les directions alors que les autres n'ont qu'une direction. Et tout ça, tout ce bagage, c'est uniquement pour sauver la tête du roi—votre conscience—pièce immobilisée. Vous voyez? Tout! … pour défendre le roi. Vous affrontez la vie dans une confrontation franternelle de vos forces, et vous jouez, vous calculez, jouez, vous adaptez, tombez, oui, non, attention, tout mouvement signifie, vous calculez …”

(204–5)

Henry uses chess to bring Saïf into the open, both rhetorically and on the plane of action. In their final interview, Henry lets Saïf know in all manner of ways that he understands Saïf's game and can play it with him on his level—even if it means sacrificing his own life. It is the bishop's command, “Tuez! Saïf,” that shocks the ruler into abandoning his traditional tactics of killing in secret. Even in his own destruction Henry, the European, sets the agenda. As Saïf says, “Vous voyez … il y a trop de contrainte.”

Saïf is initially reluctant to play chess because it is the bishop who suggests it; he feints by claiming he does not know how to play. When he does get the chess board, he brings back with it the bamboo cylinder containing the asp. Henry exposes the strategem by which Saïf means to kill the bishop and in an act of self-sacrifice which insures his tactical advantage in his duel with Saïf, he orders the ruler to carry out his assassination. In the shock that follows, Saïf tries once again and for the last time to disassociate himself from the game. When Saïf, faced for the first time in his life with an opponent of equal stature, says he doesn't have the right to kill him, Henry goads him: “Vous voulez dire: pas la force.”

Saïf: Non. Je n'ai pas le droit, s'obstina-t-il.

HENRY: Le droit sans la force est caricature. La force sans le droit est misère. Avouez!

Saïf: Il n'y a rien à avouer. Le triomphe du droit est celui de la victoire du droit: donc de sa force. Et puis … votre jeu …

HENRY: Le jeu.

Saïf: … Le jeu et tout ça, c'est trop épuisant.

Henry is quick to remind Saïf that his game is the game, the standard European response to any Third World contestation of “rights.” Yet Saïf's satirical tautology—that the triumph of right is the victory of right, and therefore its might—makes a telling point in its colonial context. The French are right only because they are stronger. This formulation drains the concept of “right” of any moral superiority. In the excerpt quoted above, the signifier “droit” ends up allegorized as “force.” Henry, with all the implicit political power of his position as a European and with the newly-acquired moral power of an intellectual equal who is willing to sacrifice himself to maintain that position, forces Saïf to play the game he claimed he couldn't play.

the royal game—Chess symbolizes wonderfully the Western appropriation of more ancient forms of knowledge and culture. Etymologically, English still reflects the innovations in knowledge the West took from the Arab world in such words as “algebra” (from the Arabic al-jebr, the reunion of broken parts) and “zero” (from the Arabic sifr). The game of chess came, as did its very name, to Europe from the Orient. “Some of the Arab terminology remains to this day. Take the word ‘check mate.’ It comes from the Persian sháh mát, sháh meaning ‘king’ and mát meaning ‘helpless’ or ‘lost.’ From sháh also comes the name of the game in many languages: scacchi (Italian), Schach (German), échecs (French), chess (English).⁵

Such knowledge makes Henry's invitation to Saïf, an Islamic ruler, all the more piquant.

“the master of the show”—If life is a game of chess, as Henry states, who moves the pieces? In Through the Looking Glass, though the characters seem to be moving of their own volition, they are in fact following a chess problem worked out by Lewis Carroll and given in his preface of 1896. “[T]he ‘check’ of the White King at move 6, the capture of the Red Knight at move 7, and the final ‘checkmate’ of the Red King, will be found, by any one who will take the trouble to set the pieces and play the moves as directed, to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game.”⁶ However, if the question “Who moves the pieces?” admits of a response in the case of Through the Looking Glass, the situation in Le Devoir de violence is more complex. Are Kratonga and Wampoulo, Bouremi and Kassoumi, Chevalier and Vandame only pieces in a historical chess game? Surely that is taking the metaphor too far. Henry in his original formulation implies that Saïf's hand is the controlling one (“Tout! … pour défendre le roi”), but the hereditary ruler of Nakem, while Machiavellian in the extreme, is not omnipotent. He cannot “move” the White pieces; he can only “take” them.

Le Devoir de violence has little to say about a metaphysical level of reality. Christianity and Islam are portrayed as sham, and Dougouli's animism, while accorded a super-natural power, remains within the sphere of the négraille. The response that Omar Khayyam gives to the question posed above, as rendered by Edward Fitzgerald, is noticeably lacking in Ouologuem's prose.

We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And he that tossed you down into the Field,
He knows about it all—He knows—He knows!

(The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 68–70)

breaking the rules—Textual chess is not to be confused with a game in the real world. When an author needs to use chess as a metaphor, he will frequently subordinate the prescribed series of moves to the higher requirements of his textual strategy. Lewis Carroll based much of Through the Looking Glass on chess moves, yet in order to maintain the narrative focus on Alice, he was obliged to violate several aspects of the game. As he wrote in the 1896 preface, “The alternation of Red and White is perhaps not so strictly observed as it might be, and the ‘castling’ of the three Queens is merely a way of saying that they entered the palace.”⁷ Henry and Saïf play an equally “impossible” game. Henry starts out by moving the king, and Saïf replies with his queen. In real-world chess, neither of these pieces could be moved before the pawns which precede them. Textually, however, Henry's first “move” (verbally stated) allows for a crucial ambiguity:

Saïf: Les symboles ne meurent jamais, fit-il, cependant que crépitait au feu le vipère qu'il avait dressée. Voilà des générations que le Nakem est né, et depuis quinze minutes seulement, l'on sait s'entretenir de sa santé.

HENRY: Mais il ne mourra pas, le roi.

Saïf: Jouez! la reine.

(206)

Does Henry's pronoun il refer to le roi or to le Nakem? Perhaps both.

the violence of the knights—Kratonga and Wampoulo, the knights of Henry's allegory, are Saïf's hit men. They are unswerving in their loyalty to the ruler and carry out their various beatings and torturings with no trace of emotion. Though Ouologuem has Kratonga talk like a Paris street thug, his execution of Governor Vandame reveals a streak of twisted refinement. He plays with his victim, subjecting him to all manner of degradations before snuffing him out. Professor Obiechina has a fine discussion on the role such violence plays in Ouologuem's novel.

[The] relationship between violence and political domination is well explored in Bound to Violence. As a thesis, its surface implications are fully established as the “niggertrash” are trodden down and totally subjected through “the mighty Saïf's meticulously organized cruelty,” and by Saïf's macchiavellian [sic] elimination of one French colonial governor after another without being found out. The violence we have here has nothing to do with that other kind of purposeless outburst which is often equated with a state of incivility and barbarism. Every single act of violence undertaken by the Saïf or by his hatchetmen with his prompting is a deliberate act, a deliberate policy, geared towards the furtherance of a specific political objective or the breaking down of a specifically obstructive will. The quality and subtlety of it raises the act to an artistic undertaking which adds an extra dimension of narrative realization to the novel. And to further elucidate his point by contrast, the author gives us numerous examples of ugly, uncharted violence, like the murder of Awa by her angry lover, which clearly bespeak of a crude and perverted use of the same instrument which has been so refined in more sophisticated hands.⁸

Yet we must remain true to the evidence of the novel. Kratonga and Wampoulo too are capable of barbarism. In order to avenge themselves on Kassoumi père for having told Saïf of Awa's murder by their fellow “knight,” Sonkolo, they repeatedly rape his wife Tambira, either killing her outright or driving her to suicide. (The narrative is ambiguous on this point.) For the most part, however, Kratonga and Wampoulo move at Saïf's bidding, geometrically but with unexpected turnings, like their allegorical counterparts. We do not know what oath of fealty these “knights” have sworn. Perhaps they follow Saïf out of love.

HENRY: Mais il ne mourra pas, le roi.

Saïf: Jouez! la reine.

HENRY: De toute façon, en amour … Le cavalier.

Saïf: Mais il y en a toujours un qui aime et l'autre qui tend la joue. Le pion.

(206–7)

the love of pawns—Before the arrival of the French, the empire of Nakem was made up of two opposed classes, les notables [the nobles] and la négraille [the niggertrash], a binary opposition that knew no mediation. Ouologuem's narrative strategy parallels this historical state of affairs. The first two sections of the book, “La Légende des Saïfs” and “L'Extase et l'agonie,” recount only the activities of Nakem's rulers. The third section, “La Nuit des géants,” covers the period of French colonialism proper, after the conquest, and it is no accident that it begins with a detailed account of a relationship between two of Saïf's servants. The intrusion of the French begins the process of breaking down these pure essences of notables and négraille, for it was through French education and the acquiring of Western “civilization” that the future leaders of the African republics came to power. After the establishment of French rule in Nakem, the nobles want nothing to do with the civilization of the conquerors, and, in a policy of class protection unsuspected either by the French or the négraille, they foster “mille six cent vingt-trois mariages” of commoners throughout the empire.

Le peuple, niais, applaudit; cependant, les notables préparaient en réalité l'avenir. De tous ces nouveaux couples, légaux, naîtraient bientôt des enfants, que les notables—à la place des leurs—enverraient à l'école française et missionnaire. Puis-qu'il fallait que la loi française füt faite pour quelqu'un, les notables la firent être pour le peuple. …

(64)

The marriage between Kassoumi and Tambira is the first of these to be celebrated, and the biography of their oldest son, Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, is exemplary of the “progress” that one of the négraille can make under the new dispensation.

Yet the relationship between Kassoumi and Tambira, one of only two in the book to which the name of love could be applied, is born of servitude, nostalgia for the homes from which they were taken, and lust. It is this last that brings them irrevocably together. As Christopher Miller has pointed out, intercourse in Le Devoir de violence always involves a breaching and a destruction of the cogito.⁹ Ouologuem uses a discourse of madness and interpenetration to represent the love-making of the two servants, the first of the novel's many passages describing sexual activity.

Une brise molle glissa, soulevant un murmure de feuilles; nus tous deux, parmi l'herbe haute, ils laissaient échapper leur soupirs conjugués. Transfigurés et comme délirants, étendus là, sans conscience de rien que de leur possession, de leur pénétration profonde, ils s'étreignaient, sursaturés de l'emmêlement de leur corps; du grisement de leurs gestes; la raison égarée; râlant, divaguant, engourdis de la tête aux pieds dans une attente passionée. La femme portait l'homme comme la mer un navire, d'un mouvement lent de bercement, avec des montées et des descentes, suggérant à peine la violence sous-jacente. Ils murmuraient, sanglotaient au cours de ce voyage, et leurs mouvements, avec insistance s'accélérènt au point de devenir d'une puissance insoutenable, et qui fusait d'eux. L'homme poussa un grognement, laissant son arme aller plus vite, plus loin, plus fort entre les cuisses de la femme. Le venin jaillit; et soudain ils sentirent qu'ils manquaient d'air, qu'ils allaient exploser ou mourir! Ce fut une seconde d'un bonheur suraigu, idéal et charnel—affolant.

Ils s'en éveillèrent, vibrants, fous, muets; las; vidés; oreilles bourdonnantes, Comblés, obsédés, tant ils se sentaient toujours possédés l'un par l'autre.

(56)

connotative and denotative signifiers—La belle infidèle, the French say of translation. What linguistic bifurcation occurred so that the signified of the diagonally-moving chess piece ended up as “bishop” in English and “fou” in French? The signified may be the same but the connotations of the signifiers send the speakers of the two languages in very different directions. It was this problem of connotation that so vexed Roland Barthes in his efforts to formulate the science of semiology. Signifiers in a connotative system have a different set of signifieds (“Catholicism” in the case of “bishop,” “madness” in the case of “fou”) than in the denotative system. Barthes dubbed these signifiers of the connotative system “connotators,” then remarked, “… the connotators are always in the last analysis discontinuous and scattered signs.”¹⁰ And so the rhetorical impact of calling Chevalier and Vandame the two fous is lost in English if one translates the signified of the French passage by its denotative signifier, “bishop.” Ralph Manheim solves this problem by translating the connotative signifier and adding this footnote: “French fou = fool and, in chess, bishop.”¹¹

the sexuality of “fools”—As governors of the French colony of Nakem, Chevalier and Vandame depend on the Manichean division of the colonial world between black and white. Chess itself is based on such a division, an unbreachable opposition that allows for no ambiguity, no interpenetration, no third term, no mulattoes, and no traitors. A white piece cannot play against its own king. If chess is stylized warfare, it is warfare without the treachery of subordinates. The French governors must play out the institutional roles defined for them by Western colonialism. Their authority must never be questioned, and they must always keep the upper hand. To adopt the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, the governors must behave as bodies-without-organs. (Vandame's marriage represents a legal liaison without dangerous sexual overflows.) If the penis breaks away and sets itself up as a desiring machine, it is potentially dangerous to the body-without-organs. The penis must then act in accordance with its Oedipalized institutional role: domination of the partner. Ambiguity or, worse yet, surrender would be fatal. And it is precisely the desires of Chevalier's penis that bring about his downfall. His sex with Awa is filled with role-reversals. While the all-powerful governor seems to have the upper hand with this Black woman, posing to her and carrying out an elaborate seduction tinged with sadism (the ideological role of the official penis), it is Awa who has been sent to seduce the governor and learn his secrets. This role-reversal is reflected in their love-making. After setting his dog on Awa to lick her vulva,

… l'Homme laboura la femme comme une terre en friche, comme un océan frappé par la proue d'une nef. Et, quand il la sentit, râlant sous le coup de l'émotion de ce péché:

“Comment va ma petite négresse? interrogea-t-il, engourdi comme une perdrix dans la bruyère. As-tu joui un peu?

—Oh! jamais je n'avais encore vu ça,” gémit Awa qu'une claque de Chevalier fit aboyer, et elle se lova de plaisir, haletant sous la cruelle caresse, le branlant comme une reine ou une savante putain. Sa bouche semblait toujours affamée du mollusque rose et dodu de l'Homme, et sa langue dans sa bouche le démanageait de suçoter la perle d'un orient somptueux, qui s'écoulait, ecumante comme à regret, de la tige. …

(71)

The metaphorical language here is very rich. In addition to the phallic similes of plowing and prowing, the Frenchman's tongue (another desiring machine) is metaphorically subsumed to the Orient. And this rhetorical move only reflects (in colonial ideology) the sexual passivity of Chevalier, for at the end of this extract he is being tongued by Awa. The passage that describes the governor's surrender metaphorically deconstructs the colonialist discourse of discovery and conquest.

Une coupe ruisselante—Awa—une table plantureuse! Eve aux reins frénétiques, elle cajola l'homme, l'embrassa, le mordit, le gratta, le fouetta, lui suça le nez oreilles gorge, aisselles nombril et sexe si voluptueusement, que l'administrateur, découvrant l'ardent pays de ce royaume féminin, la garda pour de bon, vécut une passion fanatique, effrénée, haletante, l'âme en extase.

(71)

These elements of jouissance—a fanatical, unbridled, panting passion, the soul of ecstasy—are what place the governor in Awa's power, “lui déliant la langue” [loosening his tongue] and leading to his eventual demise. The Manichean “monad” of the French governor cannot allow itself to be breached by the interpenetration of sex. For the body-without-organs, such a breaching brings with it the threat of death.

the treachery of rooks—In a predictably Oedipal theory of the psychoanalysis of chess, the British Freudian Ernest Jones writes, “[I]t is plain that the unconscious motive actuating the players is not the mere love of pugnacity characteristic of all competitive games but the grimmer one of father-murder.”¹² (Jones also comes up with a similar explanation for the queen's power. Since every chess game is an Oedipal conflict, the most potent assistance in attacking the father is afforded by the mother.) In his analysis of the case of Paul Morphy, which occasioned the remarks made above, Ernest Jones postulates that the chess master became mentally ill because his playing of the game was exposed as being “actuated by the most childish and ignoble of wishes, the unconscious impulses to commit a sexual assault on the father and at the same time to maim him utterly: in short, to ‘mate’ him in both the English and the Persian senses of that word.”¹³ When his own father died, Morphy turned another chess player, the doyen of the English chess world, into the arch imago of the deceased father. “When Staunton eluded him he did so in a way that must have suggested to a sensitive person, as Morphy assuredly was, that his aim was a disreputable one,”¹⁴ (i. e., to gain fame and make money) and, after failures in the “adult” world of career and heterosexual love, Morphy withdrew into paranoia and seclusion.

Killing the father is a favorite pastime of the Oedipalized individual constituted under capitalism and its colonial extensions. It is this that provides the clue as to why the sorcerer Bouremi and the servant's son Kassoumi are both put into the same category: both try to break away from Saïf. Bouremi does make an attempt to kill Saïf and goes mad shortly afterwards. In his ravings, a kind of idealism is mixed with cries and execrations of Saïf. “Saïf était une crapule incendiaire, un trafiquant d'esclaves, faux chef, faux Nègre, et faux Juif, l'assassin de Chevalier, et le meurtrier de combine d'autres! …” (96) The reader knows how much truth there is to Bouremi's accusations, but their effects are neutralized by the frenzy of his madness. As Christopher Miller suggests, “While the Saïf dynasty is the only principle of unity [to the empire of Nakem], it is also the principle that resists identity, giving itself all identities in order to dominate consistently and denying any identity to the négraille. The dynasty is unopposable in two senses of the word: it is all things at once and therefore cannot be opposed symmetrically by any one thing; consequently its dominion is total.”¹⁵ Bouremi, however, tries one escape. “Contre Saïf je choisis la folie … (97). Unfortunately, he is even more fixated on Saïf in madness than in sanity. And in true Oedipal fashion, he loses both of his wives (symbolically) to Saïf. The first falls sick and dies on the eve of her intended departure to Saïf in order to confess and beg for pardon and the second Bouremi kicks in the stomach when she tells him she is going to have his child. He assumes, of course, that it is Saïf who impregnated her.

sexuality of a rook—Henry's chess metaphor oversimplifies the dualities of Le Devoir's African world. The opposing entities are not only Black and White but also the class division within Nakem itself between the négraille and the notables. These contending forces portend a breakdown in the Manichean oppositions that the rulings classes of both pairs would so much like to keep intact. And this is where the story of that other “rook,” Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi, becomes exemplary:

Les jours que vécut dès lors Raymond furent ceux de toute sa génération—la première des cadres africains, tenue par la notabilité dans une prostitution dorée—marchandise rare, sombre génie manceuvré en coulisse, et jeté au-devant des tempêtes de la politique coloniale au milieu de l'odeur chaude des fêtes, des compromis—jeux d'équilibres ambigus, où le maitre fit de l'esclave l'esclave des esclaves et l'égal impénitent du maître blanc, et où l'esclave se crut maître du maître lui-même retombé esclave de l'esclave. …

(157)

As the above shows, the so-called évolué can revolt against the “father” of his own society by embracing the European. Raymond does this in a literal manner, and this is part of the underlying dynamic of his affair with the Frenchman Lambert. The fact that the love-making between Raymond and Lambert is the most positive, most gentle, and least violent of the whole novel has brought Ouologuem much criticism and censure, particularly from other Africans. One commentator was so frightened by the implications that he had to misread the text in order to make it acceptable: “Cette liaison qui dura dix-huit mois a permis à Raymond de compléter ses études—mais c'était pour lui aussi une torture, une violence morale.”¹⁶ Wole Soyinka's reading, while infinitely more sensitive and faithful to the spirit of the text, also reveals a crucial blind spot.

The tender narrative of Raymond Spartacus' affair with the Strasbourgois, Lambert, is such a drastic departure from the rest of the narrative, containing so little of the earlier brutality or cynical undermining, that it reads like a heightened James Baldwin. It is not only tender, it is sympathetic and sincere. … The mercenary calculation of Raymond Spartacus at the start is made ambivalent even in the very first night of copulation. Nothing wrong with that, but what we encounter is not lust, in keeping with Nakem's history of pederasty, sodomy, sexual sadism, etc., but tenderness. Yet nothing till now has suggested Kassoumi's homosexual leanings. The morning request for payment for his services sounds pathetic rather than commercial, and of course he soon graduates to the status of a kept ‘mistress’ in what is clearly no longer a commercial arrangement but one of love. Long after Spartacus has ceased to need Lambert financially, the affair is continued by both. The significance of this episode is certainly elusive. …¹⁷

Why a homosexual affair? It's perfectly understandable that an évolué should sexualize White culture and eventually take a White wife. The examples were set by Léopold Senghor and Frantz Fanon. But why a homosexual affair? The whole colonial enterprise of creating African élites was homosexual in orientation, done by men and for men. Women played an insignificant role in the transformation. The process is not so different from male initiation rites among certain African ethnicities where the teachers of the newly-circumcized initiates conceive of their task as a bringing to birth new members of the tribe.¹⁸ Raymond's affair with Lambert is an explicit portrayal of the homosexual subtext underlying the dynamic of élite formation. Raymond is not a homosexual, just sexual. It is symbolically appropriate that his initiation into European culture as an évolué should be sexually sealed by a man rather than a woman. “… et cela qui naissait, cela qui mourait, cela qui coulait en sève enrobée de la culpabilité de leurs deux corps, c'était lui, Kassoumi, le fils d'esclave, le Nègre acculé, aliéné, occupé à bien naître” (178). When the affair with the Frenchman comes to an end (Lambert breaks it off for a marriage arranged by his mother), Raymond eventually does take a Frenchwoman to wife, “défiant tous les calcus de Saïf” (182).

the man who would be king—Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi is an epic hero cast in a novelistic mode. His birth is miraculous (the “oldest” of quintuplets), his youth oppressive (the least-likely-hero motif). He undergoes a long series of tests and trials, including the murder of his mother, the enslavement of his father, and incest with his sister (a royal prerogative, as Deleuze and Guattari point out¹⁹). His sojourn in Europe is marked by several descents to a psychological underworld: his depression following his sister's murder and his eighteen-month exile from humanity during World War II. Although he achieves intellectual distinction as a student of architecture, he marries into a boorish family and settles down to a life of mediocrity.

Il avait fini par tout payer, par mener une vie de nègre-blanc,—bourgeoise, restant toujours attaché à Henry et à quelque maîtresse de cabaret, aux services haletants de laquelle il faisait appel, durant les maternités de son épouse.

Mais nul ne se doutait que la guerre était proches et qu'elle allait—accès de fureurs et de dolánces modulant toujours la même litanie—bouleverser le monde, éveiller des exigences nationalistes à Tillabéri-Bentia la terrible, savamment tenue en main par Saïf. Houlmoh! waar rèdoudè!

(183–4)

Raymond returns to Nakem to become a “representative” of his country in the French National Assembly. It is a continuation of the old aristocratic policy of feeding the serfs to the colonial machine. And the people themselves, in seeing one of their own so glorified, jubilate in their own mystification. “Choisir dans ces conditions Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi, c'était combler le peuple s'exaltant à l'abreuvoir des destinées prodigieuses, et flatter le Blanc qui piaillerait avoir civilisé son sous-développé” (189–90). When Kassoumi realizes this, his rage and alienation deepen. His very existence becomes the embodiment of protest. “Mais la notabilité, ici—comme ailleurs la bourgeoisie—était prête à récupérer ces contestations—libellant, étiquetant, emballant, vendant jusques au scandale” (191–2). Raymond realizes to his horror that no matter what he does, he plays into the hands of Saïf and his class. The epic hero cannot slay the father in this degraded modern world; his crown is hollow. In true Nakemian style, he takes out his frustration by visiting sexual violence on his wife. This only makes the sex better.

trait d'union—On his way to Saïf's palace for the final confrontation, Henry describes to Raymond a Chinese pastime (more games from the Orient) which consists of attaching two birds together by a long string. When the birds are released, they fly ecstatically in different directions until the string is pulled taut. The game usually ends in the death of one or both birds; strangled, blinded. “Nous sommes tous victimes de ce jeu,” Henry tells his protégé, “séparés mais liés de force” (194). It was this connectedness that Henry wished to deny at an earlier point in his career; his religion fostered in him a desire for sanctity. This is underlined in his crucial conversation with Saïf that leads up to the invitation to play. “Je voulais être seul, pur,” he says.

—Mais la solitude s'accompagne d'un sentiment de culpabilité, de complicité …

—Pardon, de solidarité, rétorqua l'évêque.

—L'homme est dans l'histoire et l'histoire dans la politique. Nous somme déchirés par la politique. Il n'y a ni solidarité ni pureté possible.

—L'essentiel c'est de désespérer de la pureté, et de croire qu'on a raison d'en désespérer. L'amour n'est pas autre.

(201)

Henry and Saïf share the same idea about the soiling interconnectedness of human beings, but where Saïf says “politics,” Henry says “love.” We have seen above how the act of love brings with it an interpenetration. So do acts of violence. As so much of the sex in Ouologuem's novel shows, the two are not so far removed from one another. The trait d'union, the name the Chinese gave to their game of bound birds, is both the scepter and the phallus, the bishop and the king. “Tous deux avient affronté l'ultime mensonge ou l'ultime vérité de l'existence” (204).

opposing sides—Saïf and Henry are interconnected in both love (there are homosexual undertones in the final chapter) and politics. Their trait d'union is the bamboo cylinder, which rolls between them threatening both, and … the game. The very rocking of the cylinder between the two opponents becomes a Russian roulette. “Doisje avoir peur?” Henry asks.

—Peur? De qui? De quoi? De vous? De moi? De nous, de ca? Je vous préviens … il ne faut pas avoir peur!

—Sinon? fit l'évêque, relevant le défi.

—Sinon vous vous maudirez d'avoir sous-estimé vos forces. Et de toute façon, qu'importe! Jouez! Chaque joueur est un object fonctionnel dont le joueur est le jouet et l'enjeu. Cherchez à piéger le partenaire.

—Et s'il abstient?

—De quoi?

—De jouer.

—Il ne s'abstient pas; il ne s'abstiendra pas. C'est un partenaire. Il doit être pris dans ce mouvement agressif, pendulaire, où une tension en suscite une autre, de sorte que chacun poursuit la mort du piège de l'autre.

(205)

If humans are connected through love, they are also connected through politics, and both these links are themselves linked through violence. Yet this violence can be contained by rules, mastered by understanding, played out not through killing but in a game: a game of diplomacy, a game of courtship, perhaps, even, a game of chess.

endgame—By the time Henry and Saïf begin their game, they have agreed “to speak the same language.” It is the language of Nakem. In the final dialogue, Saïf and Henry rehearse the whole geneology of the Nakemian throne. This geneology is punctuated with praises, calls to play, and names of the pieces being moved. Sandra Barkan compares this dialogue to that of an Ionesco play,²⁰ but the chronology of the royal descent is anything but absurd; the whole history of Nakem is encapsulated within it. The game takes on a ritual, incantatory quality, and, ecstatically, Saïf ben Isaac El Héït ends the line with himself: the signified pronouncing its own signifier. Meaning and History coincide, and for the rest of the night dust falls on the chessboard while the opponents “se cherchaient l'un l'autre jusqu' à ce que la terrasse fût salie des hauteurs noirâtres de l'aurore” (207–8).

It is a poetic and mysterious ending. The intricately-worded promise that Saïf will be reborn “sous les cendres chaudes de plus de trente Républiques africaines” (207) adds a note of menace to an already ambiguous ending. It projects toward the novels of disillusionment, when the generation of Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi has taken over and continued its terrorization of the négraille. But such a future is only hinted at. Le Devoir itself ends on a mystic note, invoking in its final lines Nakem, memory, the throbbing geography of the empire, the medieval elements, and finally, the game: “… à cette heure où le regard Nakem vole autour des souvenirs, la brousse comme la côte était fertile et brûlante de pitié. Dans l'air, l'eau, et le feu, aussi, la terre des hommes fit n'y avoir qu'un jeu …” (208).

envoi—

This geometrical waltz is all a game
and played by forces we are wont to call
man and the devil, God and Fate
cliches recalled to hide the mess
of which our little dreams are made
a game of chess
The pieces move in forms more pure
than do the passions that stir the hand
to touch a knight or fire a gun
in the rigid square eight-squared
pieces march and minuet
while violence ranges in the room
and lovers lie or play to kill
the time it takes to touch another
soiled human soiling hand
and only then to say
“j'adoube”

Notes

1. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 28.

2. Yambo Ouologuem, Le Devoir de violence (Paris, Seuil, 1968), 206. The page numbers of all subsequent citations will follow in parentheses.

3. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of a Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 49.

4. Valdimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, ed. Louis Wagner, 2nd ed., American Folklore Society Bibliographic and Special Series, Vol. 9 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1968), 77–78.

5. Harold C. Schonberg, Grandmasters of Chess (New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1973), 14.

6. Lewis Carroll, “Preface from Through the Looking Glass,” in The Chess Reader: The Royal Game in World Literature, comp. Jerome Salzmann (New York: Greenberg, 1949), 181.

7. Carroll, 181.

8. E. N. Obiechina, “Perception of Colonialism in West African Literature,” in Literature and Modern West African Culture, ed. D. I. Nwoga (Benin City: Ethiope Publishing, 1978), 56.

9. Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985), 234.

10. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 91.

11. Ralph Manheim, trans., Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971), 178.

12. Ernest Jones, “The Problem of Paul Morphy: A Contribution to the Psycho-Analysis of Chess,” in The Chess Reader: The Royal Game in World Literature, comp. Jerome Salzmann (New York: Greenberg, 1949), 240.

13. Jones, 268.

14. Jones, 267.

15. Miller, 232.

16. Raymond O. Elaho, “Le Devoir d'amour dans le devoir de violence de Yambo Ouologuem,” L'Afrique littéraire et artistique, 56 (1979): 68.

17. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976), 103–4.

18. Robert Philipson, “Literature and Ethnology: Two Views of Manding Initiation Rites,” Interdisciplinary Dimensions of African Literature, eds. Anyidoho, et al. (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1985), 178–79.

19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oediupus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 209–11.

20. Sandra Barkan, “Le Devoir du violence: A Non-History,” Interdisciplinary Dimensions of African Literature, eds. Anyidoho, et. al. (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1985), 106.