Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity [1 ed.] 9781443863445, 9781443853521

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Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity

Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity

Edited by

H. Adlai Murdoch and Zsuzsanna Fagyal

Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity, Edited by H. Adlai Murdoch and Zsuzsanna Fagyal This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by H. Adlai Murdoch and Zsuzsanna Fagyal and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5352-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5352-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS .............................................................................. ix PREFACE ...................................................................................................... x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................. xvi Part I: Introduction Francophonie from a Geocultural Perspective............................................. 2 H. Adlai Murdoch and Zsuzsanna Fagyal Part II: Hybrid Spaces, Hybrid Identities CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................ 14 World Literature, Francophonies, and Globalized Oceans: From Evariste Parny to Ananda Devi Françoise Lionnet CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................... 32 A Particular Universalism: The “Francophonie” of Henri Lopes Roxanna Curto CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................ 51 Polycentric Aesthetics through the Empowering Lens of the Emancipated Subaltern: Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah Dimanche Evelyne Leffondre-Matthews Part III: Performing Francophonie: Text, Music, and the Arts CHAPTER FOUR .......................................................................................... 80 Foreignness in Language, Foreignness of Language Brian McLoughlin

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CHAPTER FIVE............................................................................................ 90 “Francopolyphonies”: Musical Movements in the French-Language Text Alison Rice CHAPTER SIX............................................................................................ 105 ‘L’aboutissement de deux êtres’: Representations of Marseille/Comores in Contemporary French Hip-Hop Chong J. Bretillon CHAPTER SEVEN ...................................................................................... 124 Transnational Francophonies in Contemporary Art: Visualizing Franco-Maghrebi Crossings Siobhán Shilton Part IV: Francophone African Identities between Novelty and Tradition CHAPTER EIGHT ....................................................................................... 146 Sky-Birds and Dead Trees: Edmond Jabès and Imru’ al-Qays Yasser Elhariry CHAPTER NINE ......................................................................................... 164 What is New about Amadou Hampaté Bâ? Translation, Interpreting, and Literary History Jeanne Garane CHAPTER TEN .......................................................................................... 187 World-Identity in a Globalized World: What Role(s) for Francophone African Novelists? Awa Sarr CHAPTER ELEVEN .................................................................................... 198 Shanty-towns and the Disruption of the Colonial Urban Order in Algiers and Casablanca Jim House CHAPTER TWELVE.................................................................................... 216 Frontières de Francophonie: Francophone Africa and Rethinking Political and Disciplinary Boundaries John Nimis

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Part V: Écriture, féminité, créolité CHAPTER THIRTEEN ................................................................................. 232 Traveling in the New Francophonies: Maryse Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman and J.-M. G. Le Clézio’s Révolutions Robert Miller CHAPTER FOURTEEN ................................................................................ 247 The Sounds of Silence in Gisèle Pineau’s L’Espérance Macadam Véronique Maisier CHAPTER FIFTEEN .................................................................................... 260 Simone Schwarz-Bart and Marie-Célie Agnant as « interprètes » of Caribbean Orality Gloria Nne Onyeoziri CHAPTER SIXTEEN ................................................................................... 275 Caribbean Women’s Novels and the Representation of Postcolonial Immigrant Identity Luc Fotsing Fondjo Part VI : Postcolonial Francophonie CHAPTER SEVENTEEN .............................................................................. 292 The Paradoxes and Myths of Francophonie Thomas A. Hale CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ................................................................................. 309 French From Within: Colonial Legacy and Postcolonial Policy of the French Language in Africa Kamal Salhi CHAPTER NINETEEN ................................................................................. 330 Francophone Identities between “Tout-Monde” and “Monde” Servanne Woodward CHAPTER TWENTY ................................................................................... 346 Are we Post-Francophone Yet? (Or is the Future of Francophonie Behind Us?) Lia Brozgal

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ........................................................................... 367 “Two solitudes”? Francophone Studies and Postcolonial Theories Dominique Combe CONTRIBUTORS ........................................................................................ 387 INDEX ....................................................................................................... 390

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration 3-1. Outside the railway station in Saint Quentin. Reproduced with permission, courtesy, © Bandits Illustration 3-2. Zouina’s subjective gaze on Ahmed’s arrival, courtesy, © Bandits llustration 3-3. Zouina’s bus ride home later on, her wounded hand wrapped in her scarf, courtesy, © Bandits Illustration 3-4. Access to the domestic space of the new home, courtesy, © Bandits Illustration 3-5. M. and Mrs. Donze’s voyeuristic glance, courtesy, © Bandits Illustrations 3-6. 3-7 Illustrations 3-6. 3-7 Zouina and Mme Donze listening to Ménie Grégoire, courtesy, © Bandits Illustration 3-8. Illustration 3-8. Vast field of greens awaking Zouina’s senses, courtesy, © Bandits Illustration 3-9. Zouina’s portable sensorium, courtesy, © Bandits Illustration 3-10. Polysemy of the veil, courtesy, © Bandits Illustration 7-1. Kader Attia: Correspondance, video, courtesy, the artist and Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Paris, 2003 Illustration 7-2. Kader Attia: La Machine à rêves, sculpture, courtesy, the artist and private collection, 2003 Illustration 7-3. Kader Attia: Ghost, sculpture, courtesy, the artist, Collection Centre George Pompidou, Paris, and private collection, 2008 Illustration 7-4. Kader Attia, Holy Land, sculpture, courtesy, the artist and private collection, 2007

PREFACE KAMAL SALHI UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

In 1837, Lord Durham claimed that French Canadians have no history and no literature. In the nineteenth century Metternich, highly suspicious of nationalism, put down Italy as only “a geographical expression.” In the 1930s Ferhat Abbas, an Algerian political leader under colonial rule stated that he searched everywhere and found no Algerian nation. Meanwhile, as we know, the French Canadians consolidated a distinct nationalist sentiment and even stood on the verge of independence in the Québec homeland. Italy became a nation-state, not just a piece of geography. Ferhat Abbas later became the first leader of the Algerian provisional government in 1958, and Algeria became a state in 1962. In these cases and many others, the past was not a certain guide to the future. One of the tenets of Francophone Studies is that every Francophone nation consists of multiple identities, and that any attempt to argue for a single, monolingual identity is at once a brutal assault on the very conception of justice and reality. However, just like nations, university French departments would not exist if they didn’t have an identity coherent enough to provide a focus for the many things French academics teach and study: history, sociology, political science, culture, language, linguistics, literature, drama, visual arts, etc. The range of subjects incorporated into mainstream French studies is extremely wide, and it has traditionally been felt that they all hold together because France and its language suffice to bring them together. This momentous edited volume brings together a set of new perspectives in French Studies that H. Adlai Murdoch and Zsuzsanna Fagyal have adeptly framed to subvert the idea that “France” or “French” is the uncontested centre drawing together this diversity. For those engaged with Francophone Studies, there is a recognition that during the colonial period Francophone cultures and identities presented to the world were smokescreens intended to justify brutal oppression. Today’s reality is also much more diverse and confused than the harmonious images that have been inherited from earlier writers and cultural producers. There can be no question that the content and the choice of the material used must therefore reflect and provide a centre of gravity that forms distinct topics

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into a coherent whole. However, those of us working in Francophone Studies should always be aware that the idea of coherence and wholeness should be a means to the end of uncovering and promoting cultural, linguistic, and political diversity. Beyond the essential elements that define separate entity, there are energizing elements that help arouse a national awakening in what might appear to be a previously non-existent community. From this perspective, the process of collective group fermentation can suggest the newness of people-hood and seem unproductive historically, without roots in the distant past. But we should concede that even the oldest national communities experienced their beginnings at certain points in time, suggesting an emergence of something from nothing. Here, Murdoch and Fagyal craftily engineer a book that illustrates different sets of circumstances and performative sites for francophonie. An original aspect of this book is reconstructive fragmentation, both geographic and ideological-cultural in nature. The pertinent analyses here tend to fit into two basic ideological patterns: one that emphasises the primacy of the message conveyed by the Francophones, and another that stresses the importance of the forms deployed. As a consequence of the first approach, it appears that cultural production takes on the status of a “weapon” used by Francophones in their on-going struggles for political, economic and social freedom. On the other hand, these analyses present this production as a phenomenon that transcends geographic and national boundaries, and recognise that its structures are inseparable from its substance. This demonstrates a continuity of vision and intellectual uniformity across the range of well-researched material in the volume. There are of course differences among scholars and academics, especially with regard to perceptions of Francophone studies particularly in English academia, but the common, successful view that transpires from the volume is that its conception is one that has both modern and post-modern constituents. It indicates a unity of interpretation that goes beyond any individual differences of emphasis and provides new insights and methods taken from literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, colonial history, film studies, music, the visual arts, and discourse analysis. This is precisely where this collection of original essays challenges Frenchcentered conceptions of francophonie as the shaping force of the production and study of the French language and of French literature, culture, film and art in and outside mainland France. This validates the editors’ innovative framework in that, rather than viewing francophone cultural productions as derivatives of their hexagonal counterparts, the varying but interrelated aspects of francophonie are a product of the specific contexts, conditions and concepts that both emerged from the

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postcolonial encounter with France and other colonizing powers. Moreover, African and Caribbean literatures and criticism written in French, for example, generally have two opposite poles of attraction: one tending to look inward for the traces of an essentially African Caribbean history, the other looking outward and seeking to embrace and reshape “recent” African Caribbean history towards a plural future. There are also pedagogical applications of the material presented here, which profitably serve as new examples of Francophone postcolonial approaches. The communication of these approaches is mostly informed and motivated by Anglo-Saxon perspectives that contrast with more mainstream French interpretations. These Anglo-Saxon perspectives are constructive as they complement traditional, super elitist approaches and show the way toward a compromise between the different parties. This book teaches us new perspectives of the field, which will serve as a focus for many diverse preoccupations: cultural theory, politics, migration, race, boundary, identity, globalisation, space, postcolonialism, sociolinguistics, and, of course, the new writings of the past. These pursuits have no obvious unity beyond a concern with the symbiotic processes of fresh and lucid academic discourse, and the production of materials on francophonie that will be less subjective and biased. They represent a contemporary version of the most venerable traditions of the now well-established Francophone postcolonial studies, which were once restricted and impoverished by the total concentration on the canon of “high literature”. In fact, studies in this book have a great contribution to make to the survival of French Studies because, as is surely becoming apparent, without a more profound understanding of the processes by which canonical and traditional French Studies are reinforced, resisted and, at times, subverted, we shall be incapable of resolving the most challenging problems that now confront us in the field and indeed in university French departments. Changes that have been made in research programmes and undergraduate curricula in recent years have also been prompted by several important international intellectual trends, and have subsequently generated, responsive scholarship: Francophone Studies as they developed within French departments evolved out of literary theory into an interdisciplinary discourse. Links established between postcolonial literature and contemporary cultural studies have derived largely from modern French thought. Certain intellectual trends relevant to the study of culture and philosophy have been particularly significant: Michel Foucault’s explorations of the links between cultural history and philosophy, Sartre’s Existentialism, Saussure’s Structuralism, Simon de Beauvoir’s Feminism,

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Cixous’ subversive writing, Barthes’ textual decoding and Derrida’s philosophy of Deconstruction. These figures have no doubt brought material culture to the fore, laying down particular perspectives, and developing philosophies of French culture and its transmission and reception within and beyond France. The approaches and methods of these scholars, including postcolonial writers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, and many others, have created the framework for the expansion of intellectual discourse within “French Studies”. The turn taken in the last few years within French Studies meant that this intellectual movement was translated into academic practice. The chapters of this book broaden the debate and take us a step further in new approaches to French culture, by articulating original topics and questions that judiciously complement this logical postcolonial stream of thoughts and analysis, and ironically, contrast with mainstream French thinking. This book will call for a nuanced shift in the positioning of French Studies as more attention is paid to the various locations of the Francophone world and the special otherness they embody inside and outside modern and contemporary France. These pertinently farmed out locations are no less essential to the understanding of France than the history of French colonisation is essential to the understanding of the whole Frenchspeaking world. Within the Francophone postcolonial critical mass produced over the last twenty years, there have been expressions of concern about the origin and nature of the sources used. The corpus of primary sources can be Francophone, while theoretical approaches are not studied exclusively through the work of theorists writing in French. The sociology and semiotics of culture, cultural and political history, the pedagogy of culture, gender issues, and the formation of cultural identity in a non-metropolitan French context are by no means the sole “province” of French scholars. In this book, edited by two experts in their fields, postcolonial Francophone materials and their respective locations are studied in their relationship to the colonial period and Francophone society prior to and after Independence in ways that take account of the socio-historical readings and interpretations developed by leading specialists from different scholarly, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This has been achieved through innovative analyses that cross the line between disciplines and genres, including between canonical and non-canonical intellectual literature. The techniques of textual and artistic interpretation, social and historical debate, cultural and theoretical discourse, textual and contextual analysis, are applied with equal seriousness to both literary and nonliterary objects.

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The book therefore fills an important gap and brings a positive attitude to changes in the discipline. These have come about slowly because, in part, they sometimes raise awkward questions for the individuals and institutions involved. Fears continue to be expressed about the “dangers” of creating a “new” canon to replace the old one. “Francophone Studies” is now intellectually and institutionally accepted, though as a field it was sometimes associated with reductive stereotypes and an exclusive concentration on the colonial experience. Sometimes Francophone studies is used as a synonym for area studies, a usage that ignores the linguistic and artistic elements it involves, while “French Studies” is taken to refer to the study of “great literature” and “the glories” of the French language. We even sometimes use the tandem French-Francophone, which reflects at once the ambiguity of the terms and the extent to which they complement each other, as well as the plural ideological and intellectual orientation of our approaches and the variety of objects we study today. Francophone culture and identity form a multifaceted dynamic in this book whose vision challenges chronological binaries (colonial vs. postcolonial) as well as geographical ones (metropolitan vs. nonmetropolitan). These opposites are inevitably represented by source material from France, the Francophone countries, and North America. Canonical French analysis has traditionally given primacy to rationalism, individualism, linguistic correctness, and the written word. This book turns on locality and migration, performativity and linguistic irregularity. Locality takes on a primary role because individuals struggling to find their own identity never succeed without the intervention and support of those around them, whose identity they are also defining. Performativity is not just a matter of stylistic interest, but is an essential part of the Francophone heritage. The interest in artistic forms, locality, linguistic variation and the conscious experimentation with the French language, will give this edited book of twenty-one papers visible status within academic discourse. The massive population movements that have taken place in the twentieth century have intensified the debate on the consequences of the colonial and postcolonial political history of France and its former colonies. From an interdisciplinary perspective, the book combines theoretical and methodological analyses of issues relating to migration, identity and hybridisation with an evaluation of current debates in France and elsewhere on French identity, cultural, and artistic pluralism, the history of immigration and the urban colonial legacy. There is no doubt that an understanding of the French colonial legacy and the complex reasons for, and consequences of, migration will tend to undermine the

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traditional approach to French Studies in Anglo-Saxon universities and research scholarship. This book is a reminder that multidisciplinary research and the areas covered indisputably match the rhizomatic and comparative nature of the cohesive fields represented by the specialisms of the contributors. It demonstrates the multiple contingencies of language, culture, and social change, in which links with identity and cultural space have been unearthed from socio-historical and socio-cultural conditions leading to the recognition of local languages and cultures as distinct ecologies faced with particular issues in their coexistence with French. The uniqueness of these analyses and of their role in upholding the value of canonical literature requires us to go beyond a superficial comprehension of the concept of Francophonie and to look for deeper meanings in the disciplines that we study today.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume would not have come into being without the dedicated contributions of a number of people. We would like to thank all those who worked with us on the “New Francophonies” conference of 2011 where many of these papers first saw the light of day. Our heartfelt thanks go to Ruth Watkins, former Dean, and Diane Musumeci, Associate Dean Emerita of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Worldwide Universities Network, the Center for Advanced Studies, the Center for Global Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the European Union Center, for providing critical financial support for the conference. Precious contributions from an impressive range of departments, programs, and units outside French—Linguistics, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, AfricanAmerican Studies, Comparative and World Literatures, History, and Geography, as well as the Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education—guaranteed its interdisciplinary focus underlined by the intersecting fields of the keynote speakers: Françoise Lionnet (UCLA), Albert Valdman (IU), Sylvie Dubois (LSU), and Dominique Combe (ENS, Paris). France@Illinois and Centre Pluridisciplinaire, headed by Professor Karen Fresco, provided devoted help, and the late Larry Schehr gave budgetary support through the Journal of Contemporary French Civilization. Graduate students of the Department of French have been indispensable in all areas ranging from organization to translation, formatting, and proofreading. Special thanks to Daniel Brant for his remarkable translations and proofreading of several papers in the volume, Michael Foster for editing and formatting, Nathan Owens, Lizzie Black, Janelle Grant, and Tricia Dimit for their tireless work at the conference. Yvette Smith, our former colleague, provided great help and guidance with translation. The interdisciplinary spirit fostered within the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, a major sponsor of this conference, went a long way toward making our academic responsibilities that much easier. —H. Adlai Murdoch Zsuzsanna Fagyal

PART I: INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION: FRANCOPHONIE FROM A GEOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE H. ADLAI MURDOCH TUFTS UNIVERSITY

AND ZSUZSANNA FAGYAL UNIVERSI TY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

This collection of original essays challenges French-centered conceptions of francophonie as the shaping force of the production and study of the French language and of French literature, culture, film, and art inside and outside mainland France. Rather than adopt the traditional perspective that views francophone cultural production as an offshoot or surrogate of its hexagonal avatar, this volume aims at reading a wide range of interrelated aspects of francophonie as a product of the specific contexts, conditions and concepts that both catalyzed and emerged from the post/colonial encounter with France and other colonizing powers. As a point of departure, this volume proposes that while the main performative sites for francophonie are situated in areas that have traditionally been prominent social and cultural centers of the former French colonies, long defined as the peripheries of the French speaking world, paradoxically, over time, these locations have become socio-culturally and, often, politically independent sites that now also serve as major sources of postcolonial immigration into France and Europe. Among these geographical areas are territories within the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Maghreb, subSaharan Africa, and Quebec, as well as those hexagonal sites that have long been characterized by a preponderance of immigrant populations, such as Marseille, Montpellier and certain Parisian suburbs, such as Seine Saint-Denis, Bobigny, and Aulnay-sous-Bois. Given their varying political realities, and ethnic, colonial, and cultural histories—ranging from independence to departmentalization—these regions represent contested sites of French collective identity, producing a set of distinctive literary, linguistic, musical, cinematographic, and visual forms of expression, which we propose to call francophonie.

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The multiplicity of otherness depicted in francophone literary, linguistic, musical, cinematographic, and visual forms of expression represent formulations of identity that have abandoned concepts of linguistic and ethnic exclusiveness in favor of a postmodern conception of multiple subject positions and locations. The unitary, integrationist visions of Frenchness that have come to dominate the metropolitan public sphere have also defined French identity, for all practical purposes, despite the demonstrable presence and influence of a variety of immigrant groups on French soil, particularly from the onset of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement of populations from the southern reaches of Europe, from countries like Italy, Greece, and Spain, as well as from several Eastern European countries, grew in response to French economic growth and its ancillary benefits in health and living conditions for the working class. But it is here that, in a particularly French way that emerges from the universalist model advocated by the French Revolution, the trenchant paradoxes of belonging and otherness make their initial appearance: assimilation has been promised to immigrants at the questionable price of abandoning any public attachment to, or practice of, their cultures of origin. Such paradoxes go even further, for if France’s three hundred year-long colonial undertaking—in regions ranging from the Caribbean, North America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Maghreb, to the Middle East and Southeast Asia—was implicitly predicated on the recognition, codification and exploitation of racial difference and its corollaries of superiority and inferiority, domination and submission, then these long-standing patterns of thought and action cannot be swept away as easily as, say, signing a treaty or enacting a law. In refusing to acknowledge, or to account for, the fragmentation of Frenchness, or its pluralization into the simultaneity of identities or positionalities, then, French subjects are tacitly refusing to come to terms both with stubborn remnants of racism in contemporary France and with its dark origins in the French colonial experience. These French-centered perceptions of difference and duality—along with their underlying perceptions of race and, indeed, their implicitly hierarchized and yet inseparably ‘multiple otherness’—are precisely the attitudes that contemporary ‘postcolonial’ France cannot shake off. If, then, the unacknowledged true face of Frenchness is indeed plural, then the tensions emerging from the new metropole are evidence of the paradoxical corollaries of resistance inscribed by the nation’s excluded groups. The result of this intersection of economic and demographic patterns largely has been the marginalization or erasure of difference within an overall context of Frenchness, as the stereotyping of the nation’s

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‘others’ has tended to subsume their cultural, political, and identitarian heterogeneity into an overall framework of universalist exclusion. The exploding diversity of France’s population, coupled with the everexpanding literary and cultural productivity of its former colonial populations on the periphery—as well as the refusal to recognize the implications of this pluralistic demographic shift for the discursive articulation of a wider, more inclusive vision of francité—mark the fault lines in attempts at integrating France’s ethnic and cultural minority populations into a unifying framework of French culture. Key events on the politico-cultural front during the watershed year of 2005, especially the controversial Law 158 of 23 February 2005 which urged the incorporation into school syllabuses of ‘the positive role of the French presence abroad, particularly in North Africa’, and the minority-driven suburban uprising of November of that year were spearheaded by a generation of youth whose self-definition was framed largely through dual ethno-cultural affiliations learned during France’s extended colonial control of its peripheral territories.1 Although repealed at the beginning of 2006 by the Constitutional Council as an administrative rather than a legal matter, Law 158’s attempt at shaping colonial history generated a public outcry against State intervention in historical matters and exposed the fragile link between colonial memory and representations of new ethnic minorities in France today. The experience of marginalization of these communities today arose out of their burgeoning diversity repelled since colonial times, rendering them quasi-invisible and largely inconsequential to the country to which they belong. In other words, then, France’s consistent struggle with its ethnically distinct ‘others’ and their embodiment of new categories of Frenchness provided an alternative platform for scriptive and performative efforts that can potentially usher in new representations of transnational Francophone space where artificially imposed borders of language and politics finally give way to contemporary inscriptions of cultural pluralism. In his essay “Symptomatically Black: A Creolization of the Political,” Barnor Hesse outlines “the historical formulation of creole as a description” (37), resulting in an “historical schema of transculturation, in the movement from cultures to bodies to languages” (38). And, as Hesse posits, “creolization … describes the outcome of intimate relations and discrepant fusions between formerly geographically disparate cultures; variously European and hegemonic, as well as variously American, African, Asian, and subaltern” (39). Such a formulation effectively engages the various pluralities intrinsic to ‘creolizing encounters’, encompassing both those between metropole and periphery and those

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between peripheral subjects and communities brought together through the colonially driven commonalities of such encounters. So that if, as Hesse continues, creolization “emerge[s] from the relations associated with discrepant forms of identification and racial regulation” (40), the myriad possibilities to be produced by linguistic and ethnocultural crossings spanning both metropole and periphery are immediately apparent. In their intrinsic subtending of subtexts and subjects, these articulations of pattern and procedure forge new paths and possibilities for cultural expression. These phenomena play out in a number of different ways in various locations in the francophone world. Among the most recognizable of these are various creole languages and cultures in sites as differentiated as Louisiana, Martinique, and Mauritius. Here, critical intersections of race, culture, and language open up avenues of difference whose ongoing articulations in the domains of literature and music have provided broad platforms for cultural expression and affirmation in contexts of resistance to and difference from the historical dominance of mainstream French culture. The path trod by these populations of color from their position in the periphery is in stark contrast to the recent experience of Europe’s populations of color, tracing what Fatima El-Tayeb calls “a crisis caused by an ideology of racelessness that seems incapable of addressing racialized inequality” (237). Indeed, one might arguably claim that it would be more correct to replace “addressing” here with “recognizing,” since countries like France continue to insist that the supposedly “raceblind” policies pursued by their society means that they do not have a race problem. But in fact, these intolerant attitudes are aimed not at Europe’s foreign-born “others,” but at “Europe-born Muslims who are thus reframed as not belonging … the focus … on … cultural values … cements the fundamental ‘foreignness’ of Muslims born and raised in Europe.” The resulting failures are massive, broad-based, and increasingly definitive of the dilemmas facing Europe’s pluralist societies, tracing a series of inequalities that “permeate[s] all sectors of society, from the continent-wide failure of school systems to address the needs of children from migrant and minority families to their overrepresentation in prisons and unemployment statistics” (237). Clearly, the fact that difference is often both internal and intrinsic to these societies poses a set of challenges that are yet to be successfully contested or, for that matter, surmounted. What becomes increasingly apparent in the social relations that characterize postcolonial France is the persistence of a field of vision unalterably inflected by the paradigms, hierarchies, and binarisms of a bygone era of colonial domination. These praxes of distinction and

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exclusion and their corollaries of difference and duality are precisely the attitudes that contemporary "postcolonial" France cannot shake off, as Etienne Balibar claims, "Racism in France is essentially colonial, not in terms of a "leftover" from the past but rather in terms of the continuing production of contemporary relations" (1745). But such praxes do not necessarily negate the definition of a postcolonial France, but rather delimit it to the extent that the effects of the colonial trace work to shape the forces at work in contemporary French society. In other words, if, as Cooper and Stoler put it, “it is a truism that it is the categories of colonialism, not colonialism itself, that are alive and well” (34), then these sociocultural subtexts are what work to turn the latent pluralisms of the postcolonial era into unacceptable iterations of a hybrid France. The increasing diversity of France’s postwar, postcolonial population has been on a direct collision course with the presumed homogeneity of a nation defined above all by the unicity of its francité. This critical splitting and fragmentation of traditional concepts of Frenchness, which had long been presumed to be based on sameness and constitutive of equality and integration, was in fact now clearly and ineluctably marked by precisely those social divisions that arguably had been spawned an ocean away during France's colonial encounter. Indeed, it is possible to make the claim that the first half of the twentieth century saw the ongoing development and acceptance of Frenchness as whiteness. It was literally the advent of the postcolonial era, with the creation of the DOMs in 1946 and the repatriations amplified by the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954, that forced the nation to confront the growing presence of racial and minority difference on the French mainland. In essence, race and nationality had long been implicitly intertwined. As Elisa Camiscioli points out, “The construction of the French race occurred in tandem with that of the ‘white race,’ with each project mutually reinforcing the other. This resulted in the consolidation of a supranational European identity, and that of an image of the French race as fundamentally white.” (56) These developments would simultaneously challenge and subvert the boundaries of the French national landscape, revealing the fictional character of what was at bottom an essentialist ethnicity. Interestingly, it was precisely this location of colonial patterns and practices in the periphery that accounted for the inability to recognize—or, indeed, to accept—the ethnocultural transformations taking place in those parts of the French social body centered on the mainland. By the same token, the presumption that the effects of colonialism were limited to those colonies located on the periphery would prove to be a substantial obstacle

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to recognizing the complex evolution of this social body in the present. Salman Rushdie made this point effectively with regard to the shifting patterns of contemporary Englishness, “The problem with the ‘Engenglish,’ stammers S.S. Sisodia, ‘is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means” (343). Similarly, one might argue for the presumption that the perceived distance and difference of colonial locations implied that the unalterable sense of francité that had long characterized the metropole and its inhabitants would retain its pristine, unadulterated nature from the peak of the period of colonial dominance through various waves of postwar migration. However, historically speaking, this was not the case. As Cooper and Stoler argue, “the current emphasis on the hybridities and fractured identities of the postcolonial moment looks far less distinctive when the interstitiality of colonial lives is brought back into sharper relief” (34). It is this latent interstitiality, slowly but surely transforming the principles and practices of Frenchness in both metropole and periphery that subverts cultural and demographic notions of inviolability and singularity, replacing the idea of a fixed, permanent community with a transformational grounding for the nation that was, itself, rooted in the transnational. Such a refashioning of the essential tenets of Frenchness, and more specifically of the nation’s racial, cultural, and historical characteristics would lead in time to a radical rethinking of the character of the French nation itself. Clearly, then, from both a national and an international standpoint, the very face of Frenchness continues to undergo rapid change. As a result, these pathbreaking ethnocultural and political phenomena help to generate an ever more complex identitarian framework that is greater than the sum of its parts. The resulting expansion and transformation of the ‘imagined community’ exploits the innate but unacknowledged hybridities undergirding established and nascent notions of national consciousness to ‘re-site’ the praxis and performance of identification in both metropole and periphery. Plural paths of ethno-cultural belonging can also be taken to symbolize the varied intersections, exchanges, and combinations that have long shaped and characterized the production of Francophone culture outside France. Since much work in the field of francophone studies arguably relies on, and indeed valorizes, interdisciplinarity, the papers in this volume bring together insights and methods taken from cultural studies, colonial history, language policy, literary criticism and theory, film studies, music, the visual arts, and discourse analysis. The interdisciplinary focus of the editors and the broad scope of the volume allow us to identify

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Introduction

common themes, such as diaspora and hybridity, nationalism and transnationalism, racial and linguistic pluralism, and to re-examine the role of colonial history in contemporary patterns of many forms of cultural performance. Through a conceptual, theoretical, and procedural revision of centralizing discourses on francophonie, the papers in this volume deal with a wide variety of literary, social, cultural, and artistic phenomena produced in former French territories and major European metropolises, while making the case for dismantling the artificial boundaries that have governed the modalities of French expression and cultural production since the colonial era. By decentering and pluralizing the conceptualization of identity, traditionally cast within a nationalist framework, the volume also contributes to the debate on the autonomies and dependencies of contemporary francophone identities, as they manifest themselves through literary, cultural, artistic, and linguistic forms of expression. The twenty-one papers in this volume are divided into six sections. Following this introduction to the volume, Part II, Hybrid Spaces, Hybrid Identities, sets the tone with Françoise Lionnet’s opening essay, titled “World Literature and Globalized Oceans: from Evariste Parny to Ananda Devi.” Françoise Lionnet proposes to label an eighteenth-century poet “postcolonial,” comparing his writings to that of a contemporary novelist born in the era of decolonization and arguing that in order to understand “world literature” from the perspective of Indian Ocean rim studies today one needs to focus on the existential as well as theoretical forms of postcolonialism that this region has enabled since the 18th century. The two closing papers follow up on the existential perspective of postcolonialism: Roxana Curto analyzes Henry Lopes’ polyphonic narration in The Laughing Cry that represents and seeks to enact “global Francophonie,” a democratic transnational community of Francophone authors and readers invented in contrast with totalitarianism, and Leffondre-Matthews reveals a polycentric dialogical point of view in the treatment of space in Yamina Benguigi’s Inch’Allah Dimanche, showing how the camera brings together characters that (post)colonial politics meant to keep apart in space and time. In Part III, Performing Francophonie: Text, Music, and the Arts, performative aspects of francophonie are examined through language, music, and the visual arts. Brian McLoughlin analyzes the multiple culture-crossings in the novels of Dany Laferrière, a Québécois of Haitian origin “with an American (continental) beat that has global influences,” militating for francophone cultures and literatures where “identity fluidly crosses categories.” Alison Rice focuses on musical references from

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around the word in the texts of three contemporary female writers, and Chong J. Bretillon shows how lyrics by a rapper of Comorian origin affirm both a strong dual identity and a sense of place in Marseille, a new site of postcolonial cultural innovations. The visualization of complex crosscultural identities in the visual arts is the leitmotiv in Siobhán Shilton’s thorough analysis of selected installations, titled “Franco-Maghrebi crossings,” by the Paris-based artist Kader Attia. Francophone literature is on display in the first three papers in Part IV, Francophone African Identities between Novelty and Tradition. Yasser Elhariry’s opening paper is centered on the hybridization of motives and languages of francophone poetic expression, while Jeanne Garane’s essay revisits representations of the figure of the trickster, the indigenous African interpreter that is also a powerful intercultural power broker. Awa Sarr’s narrative on African writers’ position in recent debates on identitémonde provides a link between discussions of the literary self and collective identities in Africa. The latter is the focus of the following essay by Jim House on colonial subjects’ and colonial powers’ appropriation of social and cultural spaces and practices in two North African cities. John Nimis’ closing paper provides the Africanist’s perspective on symbolic, political, and educational interpretations of “boundaries” in francophone studies. Papers in Part V, Écriture, féminité, créolité, examine the social dimensions in representations of gender in Caribbean literary and cultural productions. Robert Miller studies the crossing of geographical spaces in Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2003) and Le Clézio’s Révolutions (2003) in the tradition of travel narratives, observing that travel itself is part of emerging cultural and social changes in the representation of the characters of these novels. Véronique Maisier’s minute analysis of Guadeloupean characters in Gisèle Pineau’s Macadam Dreams considers how representations of sound and noise give a voice to the subaltern in a society where silence in the face of injustice and violence has historically been the rule. Gloria Nne Onyeoziri explores the gender dimensions of Caribbean orality in the figures of the interpreter in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) and Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le livre d’Emma (2001), whose “trans-temporal voices” echo traumatized memories and “a stubborn claim to the right to accuse.” The closing essay of this section by Luc Fotsing Fondjo relates the gender perspective in the work of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé, and Marie-Célie Agnant to representations of individual immigrant identities and the broad identity categories of antillanité, africanité and créolité.

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Part VI, Postcolonial francophonie, brings the volume’s vast geocultural tour to its final conclusions. The first two papers return to the concept of francophonie. Thomas A. Hale discusses the paradoxes and myths of francophonie and its multiple educational and institutional legacies in France, the United States, and Africa, emphasizing the role of France in the faith of francophonie as a transnational institution. Kamal Salhi explores in considerable depth colonial and postcolonial statuses of French as an official and second language, its connections to Arabic and local languages, and the future prospects of these languages in Africa. The discussion then turns to the aftermath of the littérature-monde manifesto and its implications for the field of postcolonial francophone studies. Servanne Woodward analyzes theories put out for Francophone literatures within and beyond national borders from the perspective of Québec, Canada. Lia Brozgal’s interrogation of present-day “post-francophonie” proposes to break away from contested French-centered terms and categories to those of Maghrebi writers, whose “repackaged francophonie” allows coming to terms with Francophone and francophonie as a productive critical tool. The French perspective, provided in Dominique Combe’s “view from France,” stresses the need to bring the tradition of Francophone criticism closer to postcolonial theory in the Anglophone world through the development of common elements, such as the role of bilingualism and the textuality of the colonial universe.

Notes 1 24 février 2005 JOURNAL OFFICIEL DE LA RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE. Loi n° 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés. « Les programmes scolaires reconnaissent en particulier le rôle positif de la présence française outremer, notamment en Afrique du Nord, et accordent à l’histoire et aux sacrifices des combattants de l’armée française issus de ces territoires la place éminente à laquelle ils ont droit. »

References Balibar, Etienne. "Sujets ou citoyens." Les Temps modernes "L'immigration maghrébine en France - Les faits et les mythes", special issue 452-453454, 1984, 1726-53. Camiscioli, Elisa. “Race Making and Race Mixing in the Early TwentiethCentury Immigration Debate.” In Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World. Hafid Gafaiti, Patricia M.E. Lorcin, and

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David G. Troyansky, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009, 53-70. Cooper, Frederick and Ann Laura Stoler. “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, 1-56. El-Tayeb, Fatima. “’The Forces of Creolization’: Colorblindness and Visible Minorities in the New Europe.” In The Creolization of Theory, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 226-54. Hesse, Barnor. “Symptomatically Black: A Creolization of the Political.” In The Creolization of Theory, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 37-61. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking Penguin, 1988

PART II: HYBRID SPACES, HYBRID IDENTITIES

CHAPTER ONE WORLD LITERATURE, FRANCOPHONIES, AND GLOBALIZED OCEANS: FROM EVARISTE PARNY TO ANANDA DEVI FRANÇOISE LIONNET UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

History is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices. —Susan Howe, “Encloser” (Howe 1990: 177)

World literature, Weltliteratur, littérature-monde: these linguistic equivalents, in English, German, and French, respectively, connote different understandings of “literature” and “world,” each linked to specific historical and critical trends.1 Ever since Goethe first used it in 1827, Weltliteratur has meant openness to the world’s great literary traditions and cosmopolitan familiarity with great books, in the original or in translation. More recent in its general usage, the English “world literature” first acquired pedagogical purchase with the late-twentieth century broadening of English studies to include post-imperial and postcolonial or commonwealth writing in English. But in the United States academy, the term now coincides for comparatists with Goethe’s original cosmopolitan meaning as a result of the interventions of critics such as Franco Moretti (2000), David Damrosch (2003), and Gayatri Spivak (2003), whose promotion of a planetary approach to writing and canonicity shape current developments in the field. The French expression littérature-monde, by contrast, came to prominence as a result of a controversial 2007 manifesto directed against the use of the term francophone and signed by forty-four writers of varying renown and origins, many of them Francophone, that is, users of the French language whose cultural, ethnic or national origins happen to be from outside of the French hexagon. By setting up an opposition

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between francophonie and littérature-monde, the manifesto gave into an old assimilationist agenda that promotes the integration of the larger Francophone world of letters into a very Parisian understanding of writing as a monolingual activity that seeks to embrace “les voies du monde” [the ways of the world] (“Pour”, 2007), but in order to make them fit into the world Republic of Letters as defined and understood by a universalizing French perspective (Lionnet 2009). Far from promoting openness to the “world”, the manifesto “Pour une littérature-monde en français” is an unwitting avatar of a nineteenthcentury nationalist tradition that reinforces the centrality of Paris and its local intellectuals as the legitimating agents of global literary excellence and success. To be fair to the manifesto’s authors and signatories, their stated wish is to promote the diversity of cultural outlooks that writers from outside the borders of France bring to the field of French-language letters. But their desire to bury the concept of francophonie in favor of a littérature-monde anchored in monolingual sensibilities bypasses one of the founding concepts of Francophone criticism, that of “palimpsestic writing,” an expression that defines the bi- or multilingual strategies of postcolonial authors. French is present on all continents and practiced by more than two hundred million speakers, but only a fraction of them (primarily those living in France) are monolingual. To be Francophone is to live at the intersection of different traditions and knowledge systems that inevitably find their way into the varieties of French commonly used by ordinary mortals as well as self-conscious authors from a variety of regions. I argue here that these internal heterogeneities are an other way of understanding “world literature.” Rather than referring to a history of discrete world masterpieces from distinct cultural and linguistic traditions that can circulate through translation, francophonie indexes both a creolized space of literary production and a language that carries many allophone traces, as has long been the case for Indian Ocean francophonies. These traces echo and translate the tangled cultural dynamics of Indian Ocean colonial and postcolonial contact zones, as indeed they do of the long-standing existential conditions of the multilingual citizens of European border zones and border states (Belgium, Switzerland or Romania), or the sensibilities of contemporary artists and writers living in the creolized global cities of the North. Scott Malcomson terms “actually existing cosmopolitanisms” (Malcolmson 1998: 239) the shared realities and contemporary multidirectional lives of those whose lives are steeped in such cultural dynamics. But this is far from a “new” phenomenon, and my goal here is to focus on the existential as well as

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theoretical forms of postcolonialism that this region has enabled since the 18th century. To this end, the paper will discuss the writings of two Mascarene writers, the poet Evariste Parny (aka the Chevalier Évariste Desiré de Forges, Vicomte de Parny, 1753-1814, Reunion Island) and the novelist Ananda Devi (b. 1957, Mauritius).

Postcolonial Parny and his Legacy Méfiez-vous des blancs, habitans du rivage. […] Une mère traînoit sur le rivage sa fille unique, pour la vendre aux blancs […]. Elle fut vendue, chargée de fers, conduite sur le vaisseau; et elle quitta pour jamais la chère et douce patrie. —Evariste Parny, Chanson madécasses (Parny 1787: 13, 21-22).2

Born on the then Isle Bourbon, sent at the age of nine to Catholic boarding school in Rennes, Parny’s youthful exile to France fills him with a sense of loss and melancholia that his love elegies will later translate into soulful verses. A third-generation colon, he was the grandson of Pierre Parny, a baker from Burgundy who arrived in Bourbon in September 1698 as servant of the Governor appointed by the Compagnie des Indes orientales, Jacques de La Cour de Saulais, who set out to develop Bourbon’s coffee production and its corollary, the slave trade. Having served his master well and subsequently made his fortune as a planter and slave owner himself, Pierre was able to purchase the ‘de Forges’ title from an impoverished noble family of the Berry region to whom his wife might have been distantly related by marriage, hence his grandsons’ access to privileges and positions at the court and in the armies of Louis the Sixteenth. The family was eventually granted the aristocratic title by official decree of the Paris Parliament in September 1780. In Paris, Evariste thus enjoyed an odd position as insider-outsider on the cusp of momentous historical currents, and his status gave him an unusually lucid understanding of power and privilege. A free thinker and an esprit frondeur, a partisan of revolutionary ideas who did not actively take part in the Revolution, he renounced his aristocratic title after 1795 and served as a Republican in various governmental administrative capacities. His involvement as traveler and administrator in the imperialist project and its dislocations infuses his writings with ambivalent feelings of skepticism that alternate with a sense of urgency about the socio-political system within which he had to function but about which he was utterly lucid and completely ironic.3

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He was sent to Brazil and India, and his oeuvre bears the traces of his origins in the Francophone Indian Ocean as well as of his travels. His writings provide an influential but submerged example of literary innovation and poetic self-consciousness that announces modern and contemporary trends. Writers who question the ideology of form and its concurrent (neo)colonial social norms and rules follow in his footsteps though they may not know anything about him. His corrosive humor, his critique of religion, and his denunciation of slavery and oppression from within the very structures of violence in which he is himself fully implicated make Parny the first truly global poet of the French language, and his deformations of genre are in the service of an oblique but radical ideological subversion of colonialism and modernity. He inaugurates a strain of French and Francophone poetics that leaves a silent legacy in Baudelaire and culminates with Devi’s modernist experimentations and parodies of critical mastery (Lionnet 2012) even if his contribution to French and Francophone literature remains largely unrecognized, to say the least: few readers outside of his birthplace have ever heard of him today. And until fairly recently, few even in Reunion knew much about him. Yet, he was a respected and popular poet of the ancien regime whose lyrical love poems were known by heart to many. His satirical epics, however, offended many others, and he eventually fell victim to censorship. His impact on the literary movements of the nineteenth century was real, and his sensibility very much that of an expatriate with the kind of ambivalent rapport to both his native island and the French public sphere that announces the postcolonial moment. His racialized critique of colonial power, from the imagined collective perspective of the habitans of the shores of Madagascar, as evidenced in the above epigraph, is unique in the literature of his time. His poetic practice announces that of writers whose sites of enunciation, like his, are indebted to the Mascarene Islands, those insular crossroads of the Indian Ocean that were, in the ‘torrid zones’ of the globe (Nussbaum 1995), historical sites of origin for imaginative discourses of exoticism. These discourses created what Srinivas Aravamudan terms the ‘tropicopolitan subject’, the fictive construct of colonial tropology and actual resident of tropical space, object of representation and agent of resistance. In many historical instances, tropicopolitans—the residents of the tropics, the bearers of its marks, and the shadow images of more visible metropolitans—challenge the developing privilege of Enlightenment cosmopolitans. (Aravamudan 1999: 4)

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Parny is a tropicopolitan whose life and work challenge the tropology of the Enlightenment through his personal involvement in, complicity with, and rebellion against the imperial process. Elected to the Académie française in 1803, he was the first nonmetropolitan writer to be received under the coupole, and together with his contemporary Jacques-Henri Bernardin de St. Pierre, among the first to introduce the islands of the Indian Ocean into European literary and imaginative discourse. His sincerity and talent as an elegiac love poet brought him fame but his satirical work was not appreciated after the Restoration. By the time of his death in 1814, he had fallen into disfavor, and his successor in the Académie’s thirty-sixth seat was barred from delivering the conventional eulogy, thus breaking completely with that tradition. Parny would have no doubt appreciated the irony of such a treatment and measured the hypocrisies of his subsequent banishment from the literary canon. Of the specialists of his period who know Parny’s name today, few would be prepared to discuss what I am calling his Francophone “postcolonial” origins and abolitionist sympathies, or those of his friend the poet Antoine (de) Bertin whose family was also ennobled and who was, like the young Parmy, transplanted to France at the age of nine to be educated. In comparison to Voltaire, Diderot or Rousseau, Parny and Bertin, if mentioned at all, are generally considered to be merely “minor” “French” poets of the Enlightenment, although studies by Serge Meitinger on exoticism and form (1988), Fabienne Moore on genre (2009), JeanMichel Racault on travel and intertextuality (2007, 2009), and Richie Robertson on the mock-epic (2009) include important discussions of different aspects of Parny’s oeuvre, while Catriona Seth remains the one specialist who has singlehandedly been making the most vital critical contributions to the secondary literature for the past two decades. Parny and Bertin never really felt at home “sur les bords de la France,” not as schoolboys, nor soldiers, nor courtiers. In his 1777 verse epistle to Auguste Pinczon du Sel, a Creole compatriot who attended the same boarding school, Parny, then age twenty-four, writes in perfect classical Alexandrine verse of his European exile and of the strictures of his schooling, a theme that would become a locus classicus of postcolonial literature: Transplantés tous les deux sur les bords de la France Le hasard nous unit dans un de ces cachots Où, la férule en main, des enfileurs de mots Nous montrent comme on parle et jamais comme on pense. Arbrisseaux étrangers, peu connus dans ces lieux,

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S’il nous fallut souffrir la commune culture, Des mains qui nous soignaient les secours dangereux N’ont pu gâter en nous ce que fit la Nature.4 (Parny 1826: 160)

Adhering to the conventions of classical poetry and the Rousseauist faith in Nature, Parny exposes the problems of traditional education with its rule-bound approaches. “Nature” here rhymes with “culture” but “Nature” is capitalized, and thus privileged both thematically and by the word’s position at the end of a long stanza of twenty-two lines (1826: 15960). The word “cachots” is used to describe the boarding school and it rhymes with “mots,” evoking a modern understanding of language akin to the structuralist or Jamesonian “prison-house” of language that determines subjectivity. Parny ironizes about the “enfileurs de mots,” the sophists who can only transmit superficial and arcane competences as opposed to teaching clear and serious thinking. He bemoans the fact that the pupils are not taught reasoning skills; the word “pense” [think] rhymes with “France,” and the implication is that their education is but a betrayal of the ideals of clarity and discernment that he associates with French intellectual life in the era of the Lumières. In the next four-line stanza, the expression “docte prison” provides a thematic echo for “cachots” and thus reinforces the critique of the educational process, while the word “Versailles” rhymes with “batailles,” spelling out his sentiments about war and the court: A peine delivrés de la docte prison, L’honneur nous fit ramper sous le dieu des batailles, Tu volas aussitôt aux murs de Besançon; Un destin moins heureux me poussa dans Versailles.5 (Parny 1826:160)

A gentle but caustic rebel, Parny was not at ease with the customs of his class, although his poetic talents, the perceived libertinism of his love poems, and his gift of wit drew enthusiastic and supportive readers who made him a celebrity. He is cited, praised, and imitated by Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and especially Pushkin, for his 1778 elegies and Poésies érotiques in which he frees himself from the strict rules of classical versification. In so doing, he ushers in the renewal of French verse, although literary history gives the Romantics most of the credit for such innovation. Sainte-Beuve calls him “le maître” in the opening paragraph of an 1844 portrait of the poet (Sainte-Beuve 1844: 816). Baudelaire mentions him in a letter to his sister-in-law (Baudelaire 1973: 135); and in “De l’essence du rire,” he makes an indirect allusion to Parny’s 1804 scabrous epic, Goddam!, that illustrates his point about caricature and the Isle de France’s “virginale Virginie” with her naïve gaze (Baudelaire

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1976: 529). In Indiana, George Sand names the ship that is taking her heroine back to the Isle Bourbon “Nahandove” after a character of Parny’s Chansons madécasses. Hugo, Balzac, and Proust mention Parny in passing as an example of what fashionable Parisians read. Hegel’s Aesthetics (1975: 508) praises the witty approach he used to temper a searing—and blasphemous—critique of Christianity in La guerre des dieux anciens et modernes (1799), his first satirical epic which caused scandal at a time when Napoleon was trying to restore the authority and status of the Catholic church. La Guerre chagrined the pious and conservative Chateaubriand and Sainte-Beuve, and the latter bemoans that epic as Parny’s “grand crime” (1844: 840). Flaubert, on the other hand, seems to have approved, and in a comic scene of Madame Bovary, he shows the anti-clerical Bovary père evoking the epic at his granddaughter’s christening, much to the indignation of those present. In his 1894 Histoire de la littérature française, the eminent Gustave Lanson credits both Parny and André Chénier for being talented lyric poets in a prose-rich century that was “irréligieux, sensualiste, et scientifique” and ignored poetry (Lanson 1906: 836). He also acknowledges the historical importance of the Indian Ocean margins of empire to France’s great literature. He states that the French language “s’est implantée dans nos colonies d’Afrique et d’Amérique, dont la contribution à la littérature n’est pas insignifiante, si, de là, sont venus Parny et M. Leconte de Lisle”6 (Lanson 1906: 6). But in two important essays published in 1934 and 1935, the American scholar Edward D. Seeber chides Lanson for declaring that in the field of eighteenth-century poetry, “aucune oeuvre [excepting Voltaire’s] ne compte dans l’histoire de la pensée; et cela est grave, en un siècle où la pensée est tout” (Lanson 1906: 636; Seeber 1935: 434).7 Seeber points out that Parny and Bertin made poetic contributions to the philosophical discourse on human rights, abolition, and emancipation, and he gives them credit for making an intellectual difference where literary history sees none (Seeber 1935, 1937). In other words, Seeber credits the Creole poets for formulating what amounts to an original critique of the flawed universalism of Enlightenment discourses, a discourse that still obtains today in the raceblind Republican ideologies of the nation (Lionnet 2008a). From a contemporary postcolonial angle of vision, it is easier to appreciate these poets’ ironic engagement with racist clichés. Bertin’s 1772 poem “Aux sauvages,” for example, is echoed two centuries later by both Aimé Césaire and Ananda Devi. Bertin writes: Vous verriez bien, troupe insensée, Qui n’avez point de Colisée,

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De grands auteurs ni d’arlequins, Que d’un Dieu bienfaisant et sage Nous seuls annonçons le dessein: L’Européen est son ouvrage; Mais le nez plat d’un Africain Ne saurait être son image.8 (Bertin 1879: 229, also in Seeber 1937: 58)

Césaire’s 1939 Cahier also evokes ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole ceux qui n’ont jamais su dompter ni la vapeur ni l’électricité ceux qui n’ont exploré ni les mers ni le ciel,9 (Césaire 1971: 111)

while the writer-narrator of Devi’s Indian Tango ironically explores the maturing of the creative process and the frames of reception that condition her critics’ act of reading and interpretation. She ponders: Je resterai de ceux, capturés par une éternelle enfance, qui n’atteindront jamais l’âge adulte. De ceux qui ne seront jamais des sages ou des saints, mais d’éternels disciples. Peut-être est-ce pour cette raison que mes livres ne sont pas pris au sérieux: cette fragile esquisse d’humanité ne peut pondre des chefs-d’oeuvre. Tout au plus des fragments de beauté vite dissipée.10 (Devi 2007: 45)

Devi lays the problem of reception already formulated by Seeber at the door of readers and critics who dismiss marginal voices as ‘eternal disciples’ incapable of originality despite their strong epistemological and experiential engagement with modernity in the form of human rights and experimental aesthetics. Bertin’s and Parny’s colonial origins, irreverence, and entanglement in colonial currents had an inevitable impact on their sense of place and on their commitment to political realities as much as to the aesthetics of literary composition. Parny’s formal innovations are propelled by a humorous critique of the constraints of rhyme and the shallow efforts of the rimailleurs or rhymsters of his day. In his “Dialogue entre un poète et sa muse,”11 he pokes fun at the fashion of the times, the vapid, fawning courtiers with their stale poetic practices who obey their era’s dicta and conform to purely mechanical aesthetic codes. “On pense rarement, et l’on rime toujours”12 (1862: 349), the poet mocks, bemoaning his muse’s ironic recommendation for popular success: “Appauvrissez le sens pour enrichir la rime”13 (1862: 350): rules of prosody that remain but an artificial convention are an impediment that weakens the expression of thought and emotion. This modern understanding of the intricacies of style and

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substance, poetic grace and emotional appeal led Parny to adopt the conceit of the pseudo-translation (like Macpherson, Gray, and Montesquieu before him [Moore 2009]) to write what amounts to one of the first prose poems of the French tradition. The Chansons madécasses attempts to convey the subjectivity of the ventriloquized natives of Madagascar, an island he probably never visited, but whence came many of his family’s slaves including the woman who may have accompanied him as his nanny when he was sent to boarding school in Rennes. The Chansons madécasses inspired Ravel who put them to music, and scholars such as Meitinger, Moore, Racault, and Seth have proposed different approaches to it. None of these studies addresses the poem’s importance for postcolonial race studies. For Moore, the Chansons’ “resistance against verse […] promoted the counter-culture of prose and the counter-value of orality versus the written word” (Moore 2009: 217), whereas for Racault (2009), the work is primarily embedded in a dense network of intertextuality that includes the works of the Abbé Raynal, Denis Diderot, Bernardin, and Etienne de Flacourt. Racault dismisses the denunciation of white oppressors as a mere instance of bad faith or “mauvaise foi” (Racault 2009: 310) on the part of a writer who was himself a slave owner. But such contradictions about racial issues are legion among Enlightenment figures, in philosophy from Kant to Diderot and Jefferson (Eze 1997), and in literature from Bernardin to Voltaire and Rousseau. Parny’s originality, like Bertin’s, consists in the racialization of the white invaders with their less-than-fraternal goals. The warning “Méfiezvous des blancs” is unique in the European discourse of the time, for if the denunciation of injustice is a common theme for Enlightenment thinkers, none before Parny actually racializes whiteness from the perspective of the “other,” the sauvage, rather than using whiteness as an implicit and universal norm to which all other races are compared and must eventually conform. In addition, he does not hesitate to denounce forcefully European predatory behavior in one of his Poésies fugitives, written like the Chansons in Pondichéry where he was posted, and collected in the same volume in 1787. He writes: Ce monde si souvent troublé Par la politique étrangère, Ce monde toujours désolé Par l’Européen sanguinaire, Sous les maux qu’y laissa la guerre Gémira longtems accablé.14 (Parny 1862: 35-36)

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Unlike the other European writers of his time who “dialogue” with constructed native voices (Garraway 2009), but never implicate themselves in the violence of conquest, Parny denounces his race’s excesses and the bloodthirsty European imperialists. His point of view as a Creole tropicopolitan confirms his historical role as a cultural passeur, only partially assimilated to the hegemonic ideology of the “centre”, despite his metropolitan poetic successes during the pre- and post-revolutionary periods. Rereading his texts thus allows us to account better for the way major and minor writers, “survivors” and their “others,” to use the New England poet Susan Howe’s terminology in my epigraph, are co-constituted within a dominant mentality that only allows for the long-term survival of certain voices. In order truly to clarify the long-standing contributions of Francophone colonial writers to the sensibility of postcolonial ones (such as Devi) and to the construction of the modern canon of French literature tout court, such a rereading becomes essential and critical revisions necessary. As Yves Citton points out (on the heels of German and American reception-school theorists), reading is a historically and geographically situated activity that undoes facile or unmoored definitions of universalized litérarité (Citton 2007). It is by rediscovering past voices through the prism of contemporary concerns that one can more easily make the case for the importance of this muted past in relation to present postcolonial perspectives, and thus reinvigorate the study of literature as a site where alternative knowledge and realities are documented by means of an internal textual logic that remains irreducible to any of the extrinsic elements that nonetheless condition that logic. To recognize Parny’s thematic and formal innovations as well as his poetic legacy serves to demonstrate the long-standing influence of colonialism on the shifts that mark the production and periodization of literature and thus also to understand the flaws of a canon that fails to take into account a more global perspective on tradition and its transformations.

Tensions of Empire and L’Exception Indianocéanique? Méfiez-vous du mensonge du romancier. […] Je sais que les mots que nous écrivons se hasardent parfois à franchir la barrière entre imaginaire et realité et nous éclatent alors à la figure. —Ananda Devi, Indian Tango.15 (Devi 2007: 43, 117)

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How legitimate is it to label an eighteenth-century poet “postcolonial”? Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin take the long view when defining postcolonialism. For them, it is a concept that applies to “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day.” They point to the “continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression” and argue for an understanding of postcolonial literatures as those works that came out of “the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre” (Ashcroft et al.1989: 2). Specialists of eighteenth-century studies are now enlarging their frameworks of analysis to include alternative genealogies of modernity with roots in what an important volume of essays calls Postcolonial Enlightenment (2009). I have suggested elsewhere that the term postcolonial refers to “more than the static periodization the ‘post’ implies” and that it is thus more “useful to think of ‘postcoloniality’ in terms of ‘postcontact’: that is, as a condition that exists within, and thus contests and resists, the colonial moment itself with its ideology of domination” (Lionnet 1995: 4). For the Francophone writers of the vieilles colonies of settlement of the Indian Ocean, however, “contact” is a tricky concept: the Isle de France and Isle Bourbon of the Mascarene archipelago had no native population, but as crucial hubs of the nascent eighteenth-century French empire they helped control the strategic maritime route between Europe and India and became cosmopolitan Creole sites of interaction and Early Modern globalization. In those sites, the power dynamics of European colonial nations, their traffic in slaves and indentured laborers of diverse backgrounds, the market forces of competitive commerce, and the local hierarchies of race, class, gender, and language generated a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion that was never simply binary. The Dutch, French, and British East India Trading Companies had competing interests from the Atlantic to Southern Africa and Asia, and the islands of the Mascarenes remained valuable pawns for both military and commercial purposes throughout the colonial (and neocolonial) periods. It is thus impossible to point to one specific moment of contact and opposition, and much more accurate to conceive of colonial entanglements as multidirectional ones with a range of power dynamics, including aesthetic and editorial ones, that shifted over time and space, and influenced the course of literary and cultural history on a global scale. As Ann L. Stoler and Frederick Cooper explain, “identifying the social and political reverberations between colony and metropole is a difficult task”

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and “analyzing how cultural boundaries were maintained” policed, and transgressed is crucial for a thorough understanding of the tensions of empire within and between European sovereignties and their colonies (Cooper and Stoler 1997: 1, 6). The Mascarene Islands were veritable laboratories of early capitalism and modernity, while their (mostly white) intellectual elites profited from the privilege of their race and class. But some, like Parny and Bertin, were also lucid witnesses to the imperial process as it was unfolding far from Enlightenment France with its emerging ideals of equality and freedom that coexisted with a gradual hardening of colonial and racialized epistemes, often reinforced by the paradoxical rhetoric of the philosophes (Eze, Garraway). In her essay on “Postcolonial Poetics: l’exception francophone,” Mary Gallagher studies this “exception” in relation to Caribbean writers who privilege linguistic experimentation (Césaire) and opacity (Glissant), that is, forms of postcolonial modernity that imply first and foremost a commitment to aesthetics as the primary vehicle for epistemology and for social and political considerations. Gallagher writes: most major contemporary francophone thinkers address the question of the interface between culture on the one hand and empire, globalization, colonialism or imperialism on the other, either explicitly or implicitly in terms of and/or via a poetics. This means that francophone thinking on ‘empire and culture now’ is often more mediated, more embedded, more dense, more oblique, and thus less easily translated or applied than thought that is not articulated as, or in relation to, a poetics: that is, writing in which literary values of expression and form, including values of semantic richness, of infinite levels of meaning, of aesthetic resonance and ethical depth are—often both theoretically and performatively—central and preeminent. (Gallagher 2010: 257)

The density and obliqueness of Francophone thought is amply demonstrated in the corpus of Caribbean texts Gallagher chooses to discuss, and especially in Glissant’s creative and theoretical resistance to transparent forms of knowledge. By contrast, Indian Ocean Francophone writers can be said to privilege clarity of style above opacity, affirmative rhetoric above oppositionality, and especially irony above direct condemnation. They seem less interested in the systematic deconstruction of the French Cartesian tradition of epistemological control associated with transparency and logic, and more concerned with enlarging the parameters of what could become a truer, more global universalism.16 Mauritian writers have always drawn from diverse sources, and Cartesian clarity is just one among many. Their version of creolization, or what I have called elsewhere their Creole cosmopolitics (Lionnet 2009a,

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Lionnet and Spear), differs from the approaches common in the Caribbean. When colonial tensions are spread across multiple traditions, subjects of empire have options that may not be available in the more binary contexts of the Caribbean vieilles colonies that have been Overseas Departments of France or DOM since 1946 (Lionnet 1993, 2007). But the Reunion IndoCreole Axel Gauvin, who wrote a Creole manifesto (1977) long before the Martinicans did in 1989, is also an example of such Indian Ocean cosmopolitics as present in a DOM, as are the twenty-first century IndoMauritian writers Nathacha Appanah, Barlen Pyamootoo or Shenaz Patel whose luminous short novels belong in a genre that includes the works of Albert Camus or Annie Ernaux rather than those of Edouard Glissant or Patrick Chamoiseau. For Ananda Devi, aesthetic performance is paramount and it is tied to ethical concerns deployed and articulated in a way that privileges “the values of semantic richness, of infinite levels of meaning, of aesthetic resonance,” to echo Gallagher, but never at the expense of legibility. One cannot tax Devi for being opaque, even if the oneiric, even fantastic, qualities of her writing can be destabilizing. Her position on gendered inequality, for example, is especially forthright. But she uses the transformative powers of irony and metaphor to communicate preoccupations about gender and oppression that are inextricably tied to literary form as the expression of meaning. But because she is consistent and persistent in her focus on inequalities tied to concrete social issues, the critical approach to her work often tends to be more culturally than aesthetically grounded, and it often invokes her Hindu cultural and religious background. But her familiarity extends to Hindu and Buddhist mythological literary codes and her poetic debt to both French symbolism and British modernism is extensive (Lionnet 2011). Her entanglement in all these traditions becomes obvious once her use of exoticism is understood as a means of creating intertextual echoes that create indeterminacy and duplicity and thus undermine the apparent transparency of the message. Devi’s early short stories, in particular, are postcolonial prose poems that implicitly write back to Evariste Parny’s and Baudelaire’s representations of Creole femininity (Lionnet 2009a). The discovery of such unexpected temporal continuities provides inspiration and affirmation to contemporary writers and critics whose relationship to history, because of gender or ethnicity, remains fraught with ambivalence. To bring together these writers is not merely to trace a genealogy of textual echoes or culturally hybrid filiations, but to begin to articulate instead what might be termed a Creole “East Indies” ironic sensibility that differs considerably from that of the writers of the “West

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Indies” although Francophone writers from both regions share, with each other and with many American poets, an equal—if differently articulated —concern for literariness and its role in destabilizing the multiple ideological contexts within which they are situated and that their works engage with but also resist. The Indian Ocean roots of modern poetic practice have yet to be fully investigated, but the success of twenty-first century writers from the region is bringing welcome attention and recognition to this alternative tradition of francophonie. To focus on this alternative tradition and its unique historical use of and experimentation with genre and form, as I have here, is to open up new avenues for understanding the much more global and historical grounds of contemporary postcolonial poetics than has heretofore been possible.

Notes 1

Parts of this paper were previously published and are reprinted by permission (Lionnet 2011, 2012). 2 Beware of the whites, shore dwellers […] A mother was dragging her daughter along the shore to sell her to the whites […]. Sold, chained, and led to the ship, she left her dear sweet country forever. 3 For biographical details, see Barquisseau 1949, the editor Wercherin’s preface to the 1826 edition of Parny’s Oeuvres, the Cercle généalogique de Bourbon, and especially Robertson and Seth 2009. 4 Transplanted to the shores of France Fate united us in one of those dungeons Where, stick in hand, those who string words Show us how to talk but never how to think. Foreign saplings, hardly known in these parts, Even if we had to suffer their common culture, The hands that bestowed on us their dangerous tending Did not manage to spoil in us what was given by Nature. 5 No sooner freed from the scholarly prison, Honour had us crawling under the god of war, You were dispatched to the walls of Besançon; A less fortunate destiny thrust me into Versailles 6 took root in our African and American colonies whose contributions have not been insignificant if Leconte de Lisle and Parny are its results 7 no work counts in the history of thought; that is a grave matter in a century where thought is everything 8 You would understand, foolish troop Who have neither a Coliseum, Nor great authors nor jesters, That of a benevolent and wise God We alone announce the designs:

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He created the European; But the flat nose of an African Could not possibly be in his image. 9 those who have invented neither powder nor compass those who never knew how to tame steam or electricity those who explored neither seas nor heaven 10 I shall remain among those, stuck forever in childhood, who will never reach adulthood. Those who will never be among the wise or the saints, only eternal disciples. That may be why my books are not taken seriously: this fragile sketch of humanity cannot possibly produce masterpieces. Only fragments of ephemeral beauty. 11 Dialogue between a poet and his muse 12 They rarely think but are always rhyming 13 Impoverish meaning in order to enrich the rime 14 This world so often disrupted By foreign politics, This world always afflicted By blood-thirsty Europeans Will keep on groaning Under the painful consequences of war 15 Beware of the novelist’s lie. […] I know that words we write can sometimes cross the line between the imaginary and the real and blow up in our faces. 16 For two recent engagements with this broader view of the Indian Ocean, see Desai 2010 and Hofmeyr 2010.

References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 16881804. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Barquisseau, Raphaël. Les Poètes créoles du XVIIIe siècle (Parny, Bertin, Léonard). Paris: Jean Vigneau, 1949. Baudelaire, Charles. Correspondance, vol 1. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, eds. Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1973. —. Oeuvres complètes. Claude Pichois, ed. Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1975. Bertin, Antoine (de). Eugène Asse, ed. Poésies et oeuvres diverses. Paris: Quantin, 1879. Casanova, Pascale. La République mondiale des letters. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Cercle généalogique de Bourbon. December 2013.

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Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence africaine, 1971. Carey, Daniel and Lynn Festa, eds. Postcolonial Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Citton, Yves. Lire, interpréter, actualiser: Pourquoi les études littéraires? Paris: Ed. Amsterdam, 2007. Cooper, Frederick and Ann Laura Stoler. “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking A Research Agenda.” In Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 1-56. Damrosch. David (2003), What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Desai, Gaurav. “Oceans Connect: The Indian Ocean and African Identities”, PMLA 125.3 (2010): 713-20. Devi, Ananda. Les chemins du long désir. Réunion: Grand Océan, 2001. —. Indian Tango. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. —. Le long désir. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Gallagher, Mary. “Postcolonial Poetics: l’exception francophone?” Modern and Contemporary France 18.2 (2010): 251-68. Garraway, Doris. “Of Speaking Natives and Hybrid Philosophers: Lahontan, Diderot, and the French Enlightenment Critique of Colonialism.”’ In Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds. 207-39. Gauvin, Axel. Du créole opprimé au créole libéré. Défense de la langue réunionaise. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1977. Hegel. G. W. F. Aesthetics. T. M. Knox, trans. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. 2 vols. with consecutive pagination. Hofmeyr, Isabel. “Universalizing the Indian Ocean“, PMLA 125.3 (2010): 721-29. Howe, Susan. “Encloser.” In Charles Bernstein, ed. The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. Berkeley: Roof Books, 1990. 175-96. Lanson, Gustave. Histoire de la littérature français, 9th ed. Paris: Hachette, 1906 [1894]. Lionnet, Françoise. “Continents and Archipelagoes: From E Pluribus Unum to Creolized Solidarities”, PMLA (2008) 123.5: 1503-15. —. “Créolité in the Indian Ocean: Two Models of Cultural Diversity.” Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 101-12. —. “Critical Conventions, Literary Landscapes, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism’, in Christie MacDonald and Susan Suleiman, eds.

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French Global; A New Approach to Literary History, New York: Columbia UP, 2010. 127-44. —. ‘“The Indies”: Baudelaire's Colonial World’, PMLA 123.3 (2008): 723-36. —. "'New World' Exiles and Ironists from Evariste Parny to Ananda Devi”, Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form. Eds. Jane Hiddleston and Patrick Crowley, eds. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012. 13-34. —. “Universalism and Francophonies.” International Journal of Francophone Studies 12: 2& 3 (2009): 203-21. —. Le su et l’incertain. Ile Maurice: L’Atelier d’écriture, 2012 (Julyforthcoming). —. “World Literature, Francophonie, and Creole Cosmopolitics”, The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Eds. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. New York: Routledge, 2011. 325-335. Malcomson, Scott L. “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond The Nation. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 233-45. Meitinger, Serge. ‘Les Chansons madécasses de Parny. Exotisme et libération de la forme poétique’. In Alain Buisine et Norbert Dodille (eds). L’exotisme. Ste Clotilde, Réunion: Cahiers CRLH. CIRAOI 5, 1988. 294-304. Moore, Fabienne. Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature”, New Left Review 1 (2000): 54-68. Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Parny, Evariste. Chansons madécasses, traduites en françois, suivies de Poésies fugitives. London and Paris: Hardouin & Gattet, 1787. —. Oeuvres choisies d’Evariste Parny precédées d’une notice sur sa vie et ses ouvrages. Paris: L. Paris & Wercherin, 1826. —. Oeuvres complètes. Bruxelles: Langlet, 1838. —. Oeuvres de Parny. Elégies et poésies diverses. Paris: Garnier, 1862. Racault, Jean-Michel. “‘Méfiez-vous des blancs, habitants du rivage’: anticolonialisme et intertextualité dans les Chansons madécasses de Parny.” In Sylviane Albertan-Coppola, ed. Apprendre à porter sa vue au loin. Lyon: ENS, 2009. —. Mémoires du Grand Océan. Des relations de voyage aux littératures francophones de l’océan Indien. Paris: PUP, 2007. 295-310.

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Robertson, Richie. Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. —. and Catriona Seth. ‘Introduction’. In Evariste-Désiré de Parny, Le Paradis perdu. London: MHRA Critical Texts Vol. 20 (2009). 1-48. Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. ‘Poètes et romanciers modernes de la France: L. Parny,’ Revue des Deux Mondes, 8 (1844): 816-43. Seeber, Edward D. Anti-Slavery Opinion in France During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1969 [1937]. —. “Anti-Slavery Opinion in The Poems of Some Early French Followers of James Thompson”, Modern Language Notes 50.7 (1935): 427-34. —. ‘Parny as an Opponent of Slavery’, Modern Language Notes 49.6 (1934): 360-66. Seth, Catriona. “Les Chansons madécasses de Parny: une poésie des origins aux origines du poème en prose.” In Nathalie Vincent-Munnia, Simone Bernard-Griffiths, and Robert Pickering, eds. Paris: Champion, 2003. 447-57. Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER TWO A PARTICULAR UNIVERSALISM: THE “FRANCOPHONIE” OF HENRI LOPES ROXANNA CURTO UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

Between 1969 and 1981, Henri Lopes held various high-level positions in the administrations of three presidents of the Congo (Marien Ngoubi, Joachim Yhombi-Opango et Denis Sassou Nguesso) while at the same time he established himself as one of the most well-known writers in a literary domain—Francophone African literature—often characterized by its opposition to power. As a result, critics of his work have often commented on the problematic, even contradictory, place that Lopes occupies in his country’s political and literary landscape. Dominic Thomas summarizes this dilemma as follows: Henri Lopes’s position is especially intriguing and problematic because, while establishing himself as one of francophone sub-Saharan Africa’s most critically acclaimed authors, he has simultaneously occupied influential diplomatic and governmental positions as a representative of the Republic of the Congo. This presents somewhat of a contradiction, given the inevitable collaborationist complicity that such a position entails with the ruling elite, and in light of the complex dynamic that characterizes relations between authors and postcolonial authorities. (Thomas 2002, 90)

Indeed, it is often difficult to separate Lopes’s political career from his literary production. In an interview with Denyse de Saivre in 1982, Lopes says that “the political aim of Le Pleurer-rire (The Laughing-Cry: An African Cock and Bull Story) is to give the reader a culture that would make characters like Tonton become unthinkable in our societies” (de Saivre 1982: 121); he envisions his novel as a work opposing African dictators, an interpretation which characterizes several readings of the text.1

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Although Lopes presents his literary production in this way, he does not simply say that he wishes to render dictators unthinkable, but that the novel’s aim is to give the reader a culture that makes dictators unthinkable; Lopes’s literary politics are therefore manifested through the creation of a culture. If one defines culture as “the set of usages, customs, artistic, religious, and intellectual manifestations that define and distinguish a group, a society,”2 what constitutes this culture as well as the language and community it implies? How is it presented in his texts and whom does it include or exclude? And to what extent does Lopes succeed, or fail, in forging a conception of community capable of thwarting the forces of totalitarianism? In this essay, I will examine how the narration of The Laughing-Cry represents such a culture—that of a global Francophonie—in the text at the same time that it seeks to enact it. Analyzing the notion of “Francophonie” in Lopes’s key works—his novel The Laughing-Cry, his essay “Mes trois identités” (“My Three Identities”) and his public lectures on the subject—will show how Lopes chooses to combat totalitarianism through the creation of a supposedly democratic transnational community of Francophone authors and readers, which he calls “la Francophonie.” According to the ideology Lopes expresses in “My Three Identities” and his views on Francophonie, the existence of a culture consisting of Francophone authors and readers constitutes a democratic force capable of subverting totalitarian governments. The fragmented and polyphonic narration of The Laughing-Cry offers a model for the existence of such a culture while Lopes’s simultaneous appeal to French and African readers fosters the production of a cultural consciousness shared by both groups. Nevertheless, as will become clear in this essay, Lopes ultimately ends up envisioning a Francophone culture whose very composition challenges the critique of totalitarianism presented in his literary work. Published in 1982, The Laughing-Cry presents the history of an imaginary country run by President Bwakamabé, or Tonton, who exercises absolute power after successfully heading a coup d’état. The principal narrator is a butler, called “Maître” in the narrative, who works for the president, which allows him access to all the intimate details of the latter’s private life. Always in Tonton’s company, Maître relates the events that take place both in the dictator’s life and the country. Three epigraphs and an imaginary censor’s “Serious Warning” precede the novel’s main narrative recounted by Maître. Between chapters are autobiographical memoirs as well as letters in which Tonton’s former cabinet director comments on the text that Maître is in the process of writing. In this way, the novel simultaneously presents the production and consumption of a

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literary work while the narrative fragments evoke the image of a cruel dictator prepared to do anything in order to stay in power. In The Laughing-Cry, the multiplicity of texts and narrative voices represents the composition of a transnational culture of Francophone writers and readers. The “Serious Warning” preceding the principal narrative situates the book in the context of Francophonie.3 The censor belongs to the “Association interafricaine des Censeurs francophones” (“Inter-African Association of Francophone Censors”), “an independent, non-governmental organization” (Lopes 1982: 12). If this censor worked for the government of a precise nation, the reader would imagine that the text existed within the space of this particular nation. However, the novel is situated in the context of a Francophone association that becomes the vague and ambiguous site in which it exists. Indeed, the censor’s warning at the very beginning of the text underlines the indeterminacy of the narrative space and the book’s production. When the censor writes, “Tonton n’existe pas, ne peut exister, en ces jours, en ce continent” [Tonton doesn’t exist, can’t exist, these days, on this continent] (Lopes 1982: 11), and “Nous soupçonnons même son auteur d’être un blanc ayant eu la chance de vivre quelques séjours en Afrique” [We even suspect its author of being a white person fortunate enough to have spent a few holidays in Africa] (Lopes 1982: 11), he effectively undermines the possibility of clearly determining the provenance of the text. Since the censor does not know whether the author is “White” or “African,” he cannot place the text in relation to a writer belonging to any particular culture. Similarly, the novel establishes no precise link with the reader, whose nationality is unspecified. As a result, the beginning of The Laughing-Cry localizes the narration in a Francophone domain that is limited neither to a particular country nor to the African continent, but that includes all the countries where French is spoken, including France. The intertextuality of The Laughing-Cry transforms the text into a global space containing several Francophone cultures. The book’s three epigraphs offer citations from famous French authors: Beaumarchais, Voltaire and Boris Vian. These epigraphs establish a strong link between the novel and French literature since they suggest the existence of a close relation between the novel’s narrative and the citations. Likewise, an allusion to La Vie et demie by Sony Labou Tansi (Lopes 1982: 195) and a citation from Jacques le Fataliste by Diderot (Lopes 1982: 254-256) situate the narration in a Francophone world which includes both the grand masterpieces of French literature and novels from contemporary African writers. The juxtaposition of works belonging to different cultures leads the reader to compare them and develop an awareness of Francophonie.

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The Laughing-Cry presents a mix of styles and languages that characterizes the discourse on Francophone culture as Lopes envisions it. The “Serious Warning” notes the presence of a “style d’homme de la rue” [style of a man of the street] (Lopes 1982: 11) that, according to the censor, is much too colloquial: “c’est ainsi que l’on parle dans nos rues, ce n’est pas ainsi qu’on doit écrire” [this is how we speak in the streets, that’s not how we should write] (Lopes 1982: 11). However, this style does not characterize the whole text, given that certain narrators, including the former cabinet director and Tonton, use formal French.4 By placing sideby-side formal and “street” language, the narration of The Laughing-Cry represents the plurality of Francophone voices. This plurality is further represented by the incorporation of oft-repeated foreign words within the narration allowing the reader to deduce the meaning of previously unfamiliar African words. For instance, Maître employs the word “damuka” in the following sentences: “Le damuka s’était réuni dans une venelle de Moundié” [The damuka had gathered in an alley of Moundié] (Lopes 1982: 14); and “J’ai quitté le damuka vers minuit” [I left the damuka at around midnight] (Lopes 1982: 19). Even if the reader is not familiar with the word damuka, it is possible to conclude that it is a place and thus to understand the sentences. By introducing diverse styles and words from different languages, The Laughing-Cry seeks to create a narrative space in which it is possible to use African expressions while still being understood by a French reader. The representation of a Francophone culture in The Laughing-Cry attempts to show the existence of a free and democratic space within the text. It so happens that the characters that possess the most political power in The Country are in fact the weakest characters with the least power within the narration. Maître, for example, determines what will be included in and excluded from the text by only inserting the newspaper articles that he judges useful and omitting the rest. On the contrary, the most powerful man in The Country, Tonton, has an insignificant role in the narration: he speaks very little. Maître, spurred by a democratic impulse, claims to incorporate other points of view in the narration. He writes at the end of the story after having evoked Soukali’s tale: “Mon souci de démocratie, qu’on aura, sauf aveuglement, perçu dans les centaines de pages qui précèdent, m’a obligé à publier l’intervention insidieuse et malicieuse de Soukali” [My desire for democracy, which one will have—unless blind—perceived in the hundreds of preceding pages, has forced me to publish the insidious and malicious speech by Soukali] (Lopes 1982: 314). Arlette Chemain writes that in The Laughing-Cry speech is “democratized”: “Le narrateur non omniscient ni unique, laisse

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la parole à d’autres intervenants: critiques, journalistes, premiers lecteurs, censure, dictateur lui-même, maîtresse ou épouse. La parole est ainsi démocratisée, répartie équitablement entre différents interlocuteurs” [The narrator, who is neither omniscient nor singular, hands over the right of speech to other speakers: critics, journalists, first readers, censors, the dictator himself, the mistress or wife. Speech is thus democratized, equally redistributed among different interlocutors] (Chemain 1988: 127). The Laughing-Cry’s narrative structure, thus, in a move that purportedly renders it more democratic, redistributes speech among several different social groups.5 The Laughing-Cry is not limited to representing a Francophone culture, but also attempts to invent one in real-life through the interaction between reader and text. The main narrator sometimes addresses an African reader and at other times a French reader; the presence of multiple addressees is supposed to trigger a process by which these two groups of readers become conscious of the Francophone culture to which they both belong. For instance, Maître hints at the presence of an African reader when he uses numerous African words without translating them. Nevertheless, at a certain point in the text, he explains the meaning of some of the words the reader is not expected to know: “Boka litassa dounkounê! Ce qu’on peut traduire en français par ‘Reçois le pouvoir des ancêtres’” [Boka litassa dounkounê! Which can be translated into French as, ‘Accept the power of the ancestors’] (Lopes 1982: 47). In this way, The Laughing-Cry addresses all those whom Lopes defines as “francophone”: “Je donne du francophone la définition suivante […]: individu qui peut parler une, cent ou mille langues, pourvu qu’il parle le français” [I give the following definition for a ‘francophone’: someone who can speak one, a hundred or a thousand languages, provided that he speaks French] (Lopes 2001). By addressing both African and French readers, the narration brings into relief the diversity of the novel’s readership in an effort to raise awareness among readers of the Francophone culture to which they belong. The Laughing-Cry is situated in a place—The Country—that each reader imagines differently. Initially, the description of The Country reveals that it is not necessarily in Africa: “Choisissez, après mille raisonnements ou suivant votre fantaisie, un point quelconque sur l’Equateur et de là, dirigez-vous, à votre convenance, soit vers le nord, soit vers le sud” [Choose, after much thought or following your fantasy, any point on the equator and from there, direct yourself, at your convenience, either to the north or to the south] (Lopes 1982: 53). Indeed, if readers look to the north of the equator they will find Europe. Arlette Chemain

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writes: “Le pays décrit est celui dont ‘le centre est partout et la circonférence nulle part’ pour reprendre une définition de Pascal” [The country described is the one whose ‘center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere,’ to quote from Pascal] (Chemain 1988: 126). The center of The Country is at once “everywhere” and “nowhere” because there are no geographic borders that are able to impede the proliferation of totalitarianism: it is present all over the world on every continent. However, The Country is instead situated in time—that is to say in the memory of the narrator and reader—rather than in space. “Le Pays déborde les frontières du Pays lui-même” [The Country overflows the borders of The Country itself] (Lopes 1982: 193) because it exists outside the text and in the reader’s world. Each time that Maître describes The Country, he address the reader directly to provoke the imagination of the latter: “En vérité, je vous le dis, le Pays n’est pas sur la carte. Si vous tenez à le trouver, c’est dans le temps qu’il faut le chercher. Allez, tournez la page!” [Truthfully, I tell you, the Country is not on the map. If you are determined to find it, it’s within time that you have to look for it. Go on, turn the page!] (Lopes 1982: 58). Near the end of the text, Maître encourages the reader to imagine The Country after her own understanding of the world: Quelque part au nord ou au sud de l’Equateur, je le rappelle. Semble-t-il en Afrique, mais pas forcément. Pourquoi pas en quelque autre continent de la planète, de nos rêves ou de nos cauchemars ? À rechercher, je l’ai déjà dit beaucoup plus dans le temps et en nous-mêmes que sur les cartes de géographie. Somewhere north or south of the Equator, I remind you. It seems to be in Africa, but not necessarily. Why not on some other continent on the planet, in our dreams or in our nightmares? To be searched for, I’ve already said it, much more within time and ourselves than on any geographic map (Lopes 1982, 290).

The “nous” [our] used in this description refers in fact to those who have experienced totalitarianism: the narrator, the African reader and the European reader. Totalitarianism exists, or has existed, in the countries of each of these figures or types of readers who are expected to recognize it. In fact, the aim of the numerous references to Franco-German history in The Laughing-Cry is to create a historical collective consciousness capable of including at the same time the African narrator (Maître) and the European reader. When the character of Tonton is represented, his birth date establishes a strong link between the history of The Country and that of France and Germany: “il est né en 1914, le jour et l’année même où la

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France est entrée en guerre contre l’Allemagne” [he was born in 1914, the exact day and year that France went to war with Germany] (Lopes 1982: 25). This phrase recalls the conflicts between France and Germany that culminated in the Occupation. Similarly, the conflict between France and Germany during the First World War may be thought of as the origins of the Occupation thirty years later. The purpose of the allusions to the German occupation in The Laughing-Cry is to recall for French readers the history of France during Vichy. The manner in which Tonton seized power resembles the Nazi invasion during World War II. To save Paris from the damage of a Nazi assault, the French supposedly let German tanks and combat vehicles enter the city without even firing a shot. Likewise, Tonton seized the presidency without recourse to violence since the former leader, Polépolé, had already fled: “Ils criaient tous ‘Polépolé ou la mort. Polépolé ou la mort’, et ils ont laissé les gens aux bérets prendre le pouvoir sans bouger. On dit qu’il n’y a pas même eu coup de feu” [They were all yelling, ‘Polépolé or death. Polépolé or death,’ and they let the people with berets take power without reacting. I heard that there wasn’t even a shot fired] (Lopes 1982: 36). In the new government, Tonton is called “le maréchal” [Marshal] (Lopes 1982: 93, 128, 131, 132), recalling the title of Marshal Pétain, and Tonton’s ministers, his “collaborateurs” [collaborators] (Lopes 1982: 97, 104). Thus, these elements of the narration mobilize the memory of French readers and create for them an association between the historical events of this fictional country and their own. Certainly the narration of The Laughing-Cry invokes the history of World War II in order to make the European reader think. As the text advances, the comparisons between Hitler and Tonton grow ever more explicit. Tonton, similar to Hitler and Mussolini, constantly compares himself to the Emperor Augustus: he wears the golden laurel, the latter’s symbol (Lopes 1982: 25), and officially takes the title of “nouvel Auguste nègre, grand ami des lettres et des arts, protecteur de tous les créateurs” [new black Augustus, great friend of letters and of the arts, protector of all creators] (Lopes 1982: 131). When Captain Yabaka tries to defend freedom of speech and democracy during one of President Bwakamabé’s cabinet meetings, a minister replies: “Cela ne réussirait jamais; l’Afrique n’[est] pas l’Europe.” [That will never work; Africa isn’t Europe] (Lopes 1982: 98). When another minister declares, “N’ayons pas peur des mots, il nous faut une dictature: une dictature dans le sens des intérêts du peuple” [Let’s not mince words, we need a dictatorship: a dictatorship in the sense of the interests of the people,], and then cites “à titre d’exemple, pêlemêle, Nasser, des pays asiatiques, Staline, Hitler et Mussolini” [a pell-mell

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list of examples: Nasser, Asian countries, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini] (Lopes 1982: 98), the conversation shows the extent to which African and European governments can resemble one another. When Tonton begins a program to eliminate the Djassikini, the similarities between his regime and that of the Nazis become clearer. Za Hélène, Tonton’s older sister, formulates the idea: “faut nous venger. Faut nous venger. (…) si tu ne punis pas ces voleurs, ces sales indigènes—des Djassikini tous—c’est ton pouvoir que tu vas perdre” [We need to get revenge. We need to get revenge. (…) if you don’t punish these thieves, these dirty natives—all of them Djassikini—it’s your own power that you will lose] (Lopes 1982: 125). Tonton reveals the plan in a speech: il déclarait que tous les Djassikini étaient des voleurs et leurs femmes toutes des trottoires. [. . .] Il assurait, en se tranchant la gorge de l’index, qu’il n’était, lui, ni tribaliste ni raciste, mais que les Djassikini-là, c’était pour eux des salopards. Tout bonnement. Les Juifs du Pays. …he declared that all the Djassikini were thieves and all of their wives whores. [. . .] He assured them, by cutting his throat with his index finger, that he, himself, was neither a tribalist nor a racist, but that the Djassikini, for them, were the bastards. Quite simply. The Jews of the Country (Lopes 1982: 184-185).

When Tonton gives a radio-interview near the end of the narrative, the resemblance with Hitler once again emerges as Tonton praises the German dictator: “Hitler … Hitler, c’était la grande Allemagne. Un homme qui avait travaillé pour son pays, oui. L’homme-là!” [Hitler … Hitler, that was the great Germany. A man who had worked for his country, yes. That man!] (Lopes 1982: 285). At a certain moment the man interviewing Tonton interrupts him to ask, “Vous auriez souhaité qu’Hitler gagnât la guerre?” [You would have wished for Hitler to have won the war?] (Lopes 1982 : 285), to which the dictator answers, Le Hitler-là, s’il avait gagné pour lui la guerre, il aurait apporté le bonheur. Il aurait fait franchir un pas supplémentaire à la civilisation européenne. Facile à comprendre. De même que les Romains ont civilisé les Gaulois, que la conquête européenne a été bénéfique à l’Afrique, la victoire des Allemands aurait apporté le bonheur à l’Europe. Hitler, if he had won the war, he would have brought happiness. He would have helped European civilization take a big step forward. Easy to understand. In the same way that the Romans civilized the Gauls, that the European conquest was beneficial to Africa, the German victory would have brought happiness to Europe (Lopes 1982: 314).

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Tonton’s speech, as well as his genocidal project, is supposed to provoke a reaction of horror in the reader, whether African, European or even American. The Laughing-Cry attempts to awaken in the reader a historical consciousness capable of combating totalitarianism worldwide and not solely in African nations. The purpose of the description of The Country and the references to events from the history of World War II is to appeal to European readers and to encourage them to identify with the situation depicted in the novel. The events in The Country should recall for them the histories of their own nations: “même si les noms de personnes et de lieux sonnent étrangers à nos oreilles, même si tu livres ça et là, dans le texte, des mots d’un dialecte imaginaire, forgé par toi seul, la plus myope des taupes reconnaîtra ‘Le Pays’” [even if the names of people and places sound foreign to our ears, even if you insert here and there, in the text, the words of an imaginary dialect, invented by you, the most myopic of moles will recognize ‘The Country’] (Lopes 1982: 314). The “we” of “our ears” therefore includes a reader for whom “the [African] names of people and places sound foreign.” The narrative addresses itself to this reader to inspire her to fight, without regard for nationality, the disease of totalitarianism. Moreover, The Laughing-Cry is not the only novel in Congolese literature to compare the dictatorship in The Country to Nazism in order to provoke a reaction. At one point near the end of L’État honteux by Sony Labou Tansi, the narrator directly addresses the reader to ask: “si nous ne pouvons rien contre la chute de l’humain, pendant combien de temps tiendrons-nous encore humains? Pourquoi condamner l’Afrique qui tue Steve pour libérer celle qui tue Yambo?” [If we can’t do anything about the fall of man, for how much longer will we remain human? Why condemn the Africa that kills Steve to liberate the one that kills Yambo?] (Sony 1981: 126-127). He continues: “Dois-je conclure que la liberté ne vaut plus la chandelle? Que l’homme noir n’était qu’un faux problème? auquel cas la traite devient un faux problème, et chapeau Hitler et Pizarro, chapeau Auschwitz et Hiroshima” [Should I conclude that freedom is no longer worth the candle? that the black man was nothing but a false problem? in which case, the slave trade becomes a false problem, and hats off to Hitler and Pizarro, hats off to Auschwitz and Hiroshima] (Sony 1981: 127). When he compares the new African governments to Nazism, the narrator directly addresses the reader. In this way, Sony, like Lopes, uses the analogy of Nazism to incite the African reader to combat totalitarianism and to solicit sympathy from the European reader.

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Just as the narration of The Laughing-Cry offers several parallels between Tonton’s government and Hitler, Lopes establishes a comparison between Nazism and the Rwandan genocide in “My Three Identities.” In this essay, Lopes describes his “identité originale” as that which was “d’abord appelée négritude, puis sentiment national, puis authenticité” [first called negritude, then national sentiment, then authenticity] (Lopes 1999: 137) and declares that “aujourd’hui, ce sont surtout des limites de l’identité originelle que je voudrais vous entretenir” [today, it’s especially about the limits of this original identity that I would like to speak to you] (Lopes 1999: 137). Lopes continues by warning the reader that “le culte prononcé de l’identité culturelle, originelle, nationale ou religieuse, conduit à des attitudes d’exclusion” [the formidable cult of cultural, original, national or religious identity, leads to attitudes of exclusion] (Lopes 1999: 138). In fact, he criticizes the negritude movement as well as the tribalism of Mobutu6 by saying that the search for African origins leads to a sort of genocidal “tropical Nazism”: Aveuglés par des préjugés, qui pourraient bien mériter le nom de nazisme tropical, nous sommes capables, dans certaines circonstances, de nous jeter, la machette à la main, sur le voisin et de l’éliminer, comme si nous étions des fauves lancés à la chasse de proie appartenant à une espèce différente. Blinded by prejudices, which could very well merit the name of tropical Nazism, we are capable, in certain circumstances, of throwing ourselves, machete in hand, upon our neighbor and eliminating him, as if we were wild animals barreling after prey, belonging to a different species (Lopes 1999: 49).

He speaks here, of course, of the genocide in Rwanda, and underlines the extent to which it resembles the Nazi genocide. “Hitler ne loge pas seulement dans les palais présidentiels” [Hitler doesn’t only reside in presidential palaces] (Lopes 1999: 142), warns Lopes at the end of the essay. The comparisons between the Rwandan and Nazi genocides in “My Three Identities,” and those between Tonton and Hitler in The LaughingCry, have two functions: to distance the African reader from his culture so that he may see it from a more “objective” point of view; and to urge the European reader to recognize the similarities between events in Africa and those that have occurred in Europe to gain her sympathy.7 The aim of The Laughing-Cry and “My Three Identities” is to construct the consciousness of a transnational Francophone community by simultaneously addressing the African and European readers constituting the novel’s audience. To be

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sure, the need to expand this community to liberate African peoples and render their countries more democratic represents one of the most important themes in Lopes’s political discourse. In “Mondialisation multipolaire et francophonie” (“Multipolar Globalization and Francophonie”), a speech given at the Université Jean Moulin of Lyon in 2001, Lopes explains his conception of “Francophonie” (Lopes 2001). Toward the beginning of the oration, in a passage recalling the “Nous nous proclamons Créoles” [We proclaim ourselves Creole] of Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confiant 1993: 2), Lopes declares: “nous nous proclamons francophones de plein droit. Nous revendiquons cette appartenance” [we proclame ourselves Francophones forthwith]. We claim our right to belong to this group]. Lopes’s declaration, similar to Confiant, Chamoiseau and Bernabé’s own, constitutes a speech act that redefines a term, “francophone,” which represents the speaker’s cultural and linguistic identity. Lopes would like to redefine the word “francophone” to include both the French and all those who speak French as a second language. He would like for Francophonie to become a large global family that includes the French and for everyday and institutional French to come closer to one another in African countries. For him, these two modifications would make African countries more democratic by giving citizens the opportunity to be part of a global community and to participate in the political processes in their countries. First, Lopes imagines Francophonie as a global family that includes the French. In “My Three Identities,” he writes: “au-delà du Congo, je me sens africain […] Et par-delà le continent, je me sens solidaire de la famille francophone, de tous ces écrivains auxquels j’accède sans intermédiaire parce que nous avons en partage une complicité d’expression” [outside the Congo, I feel African [. . .] And beyond the continent, I feel solidarity with the Francophone family, with all the writers that I am able to access without an intermediary because we share a complicity of expression] (Lopes 1999, 139). This “Francophone family” consists of a community of authors and readers who share the “complicity of expression” that is the French language. Lopes’s speech at the Université Jean Moulin ends with a call to the French to accept becoming Francophone: Dans mon pays, les Français sont souvent désignés par une épithète affectueuse: les Oncles, avec un O majuscule. Les Sénégalais font de même, je crois, mais préfèrent le terme de cousins. Dans l’un et l’autre cas nous intégrons nos ancêtres gaulois dans notre cercle familial. Je voudrais

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donc souhaiter que nos Oncles-Cousins, les Français, acceptent de devenir francophones. “In my country, the French are often designated with an affectionate epithet: the Uncles, with a capital U. The Senegalese do the same thing, I think, but prefer the term, ‘cousins.’ In each case we incorporate our Gaulish ancestors into our family circle. I would therefore like to request that our Uncle-Cousins, the French, accept becoming francophone” (Lopes 2001).

Lopes’s appeal recalls the way The Laughing-Cry invokes elements of European history in order to make French readers recognize the extent to which their history resembles that of contemporary Africa. Just as the novel tried to raise an awareness among readers that they share a history with people from other cultures, Lopes would like the French to recognize that the French language belongs to all those who speak it throughout the world. Subsequently, Lopes says that in Africa it is necessary for institutional Francophonie to come closer to the people’s own Francophonie. According to him, this would make it possible to “recueillir les avis de ceux qui ne détiennent aucun pouvoir” [to gather the opinions of those who have no power at all] (Lopes 2001) and “être à l’écoute des aspirations et des préoccupations essentielles des populations” [to listen to the essential aspirations and concerns of the populations] (Lopes 2001). Lopes asks the following question: “[que] faire pour qu’un ravin ne sépare pas la francophonie politique de la francophonie vivante?” [what can be done so that a ravine does not separate political Francophonie from living Francophonie?] (Lopes 2001). For the author, the leveling of these two linguistic domains would render African countries more democratic by allowing a greater number of people to participate in the political process. Indeed, in The Laughing-Cry the language used by Tonton is so far removed from that of the people that he can no longer communicate with them. When the president gives an interview, he does not comprehend the questions the journalist asks him. “Pouvez-vous me citer vos violons d’Ingres?” [Could you tell me about your ‘violins of Ingres’] (Lopes 1982: 282) asks the journalist, to whom Tonton, highly perplexed, replies, “Non, pas de violon. Aucun” [No, no violins. None at all] (Lopes 1982: 282). Although the journalist tries to explain his question with the help of such synonyms for “violons d’Ingres” as “passe-temps,” “hobbies,” “dadas” and “genre” [pastimes,” “hobbies,” “hobbyhorse” and “style] he ultimately fails to make himself understood. Emmanuel Yewah writes about this scene:

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Chapter Two The journalist’s use of such slangs as ‘violons d’Ingrès,’ ‘dadas,’ is meant to show that, in spite of Tonton’s proficiency in formal French (at least, that is my assumption), his lack of understanding of informal street French may be a reflection of his being out of touch with the day-to-day use of the language and, by extension, out of touch with society. (Yewah 1990: 88)

In other words, the distance between everyday French and “formal” or “institutional” French prevents the journalist from communicating with Tonton. To obtain power in The Country, as in the world, one must be understood by the authorities. In The Laughing-Cry, those who possess “the dialectic” or institutional French—that is to say, young intellectuals, le vieux Tanya, Tonton and his ministers—hold more power than others because they are capable of expressing their political opinions. Thus, the narration of The Laughing-Cry suggests that if the language of everyday life were to resemble the government’s, Africans would have the opportunity to play an important role in their countries’ politics. In short, Lopes’s aim, as represented in The Laughing-Cry, is to democratize African countries by “francophoning” them (en les ‘francophonisant’) so to speak. However, it is necessary to question the supposedly “democratic” character of a community from which numerous Africans are excluded. In order for the creation of a Francophone culture to render African countries more democratic, French would have to be the universal language spoken in them. In Theories of Africans, Christopher L. Miller notes the relation that has historically existed between Francophonie and universalism: “Francophonie is built on the myth of universalism” (Miller 1990: 184). In his speech delivered at the Université Jean Moulin, Lopes expresses a conception of Francophonie that is based precisely on the universalism of the French language. He wishes to give French the appearance of a universal language by describing the manners in which it is used in Africa. In particular, Lopes emphasizes French’s status as an official language: même si des fractions de nos populations continuent de chanter, rêver et pleurer en langue vernaculaire, c’est en français que sont rédigés leurs actes de naissance et leurs actes de décès, que sont rédigés leurs lois et leurs constitutions, qu’ils rédigent leurs mandats et leurs télégrammes. even if parts of our populations continue to sing, dream and cry in a vernacular language, it’s in French that their birth and death certificates are written, that their laws and constitutions are written, that they write their orders and their telegrams. (Lopes 2001).

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Furthermore, Lopes states that French offers the Congolese a medium to communicate with each other: “Dans mon pays, c’est en français qu’un Téké, un Kongo, un Mbochi et un Vili communiquent quand ils veulent se bien comprendre et effacer les barrières tribales” [In my country, it’s in French that a Téké, a Kongo, a Mbochi and a Vili communicate when they want to understand each other well and erase tribal barriers] (Lopes 2001). Finally, Lopes insists on the fact that the French language is present throughout the world: “le français est une langue de grande diffusion: il ne se limite pas aux frontières d’un seul pays: il est langue officielle dans 35 pays dont 25 pays africains” [French is a widely-used language; it is not limited to the borders of a single country; it’s the official language of 35 nations including 25 African ones] (Lopes 2001). French, like The Country, according to Lopes, has no borders: it constitutes a universal space embracing at once Africa and Europe. Although Lopes presents French as a universal language, nearly half of his compatriots are excluded from the so-called “democratic” community of Francophonie. In a survey of the Republic of the Congo in 1985 (three years after the publication of The Laughing-Cry) “50,6% des personnes interrogées affirment lire régulièrement des livres alors que 49,4% ne les lisent que de temps en temps” [50.6% of persons interrogated maintain that they regularly read books while 49.4% only read them from time to time] (Talansi 1988: 193). Moreover, the reading public is not representative of the composition of the entire country: “En République Populaire du Congo, la population lisante ou censée lire se recrute essentiellement parmi ceux qui ont été à l’école ou qui y sont encore: fonctionnaires, élèves, étudiants” [In the People’s Republic of the Congo, the population that reads or presumably reads can be found essentially among those who went to school or that are still there: public officials, high school and college students] (Talansi 1988: 193). Thus, a community of writers and readers in the Congo at the time of the publication of The Laughing-Cry truly included only about half of the country. The representation of a supposedly Francophone and democratic culture in The Laughing-Cry illustrates the extent to which the community that Lopes proposes is not a veritable democracy. While the narration of The Laughing-Cry channels a multiplicity of political opinions, the reader never hears the voices of those who belong to the group identified as “the people” in the text. The political opinions that the text does present are those of the young Marxist-Leninist intellectuals who admire Mao and await the Revolution; le vieux Tiya who debates them and who, like the chief of his tribe, incarnates traditional African authority. The dictator Tonton disguises totalitarianism as democracy and the people constitute a

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naïve crowd blindly following him and making his regime’s atrocities possible: “Tonton est un dictateur, d’accord, mais le peuple aime l’applaudir comme s’il avait besoin de lui” [Tonton is a dictator, okay, fine, but the people like to applaud him as if they need him] (Lopes 1982: 87). Maître’s character parodies the figure of the indifferent citizen: even if Maître is always with the president, he rarely expresses any political opinions.8 The representation of a global community in Lopes’ The Laughing-Cry thus unveils its exclusionary nature: if speech in the text is “democratized,” then this democracy fails to embrace the lowest ranks of society. The Laughing-Cry and the essays “Multipolar Globalisation and Francophonie” and “My Three Identities” present the exclusionary quality of Francophonie hiding behind the mask of universalism. This begs the following question: Are Lopes’s universalism and his conceptualization of Francophonie in reality the cloak of Occidentalism? In an interview with Édouard Maunick, Lopes claims to write “pour le monde entier” [for the whole world] (Maunick 1988: 127) and cites a desire to “exprimer [sa] difficulté à exister” [express the difficulty of his existence] as the goal of his writing (Maunick 1988: 126). Lopes seeks out a place for himself, not necessarily in African literature, but in world literature: “Je ne cherche pas ma place dans la littérature africaine” [I am not seeking my place in African literature] (Maunick 1988: 126). The question becomes then if he would not in fact like to find a place within Western literature. In “My Three Identities,” Lopes speaks of his “ancêtres gaulois” who constitute an important influence on his literary work: “Il ne s’agit évidemment pas de Vercingétorix, mais d’Homère, de Platon, d’Ovide, de Montaigne, de Voltaire, de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, de Flaubert, de Goethe, de Heine, de Shakespeare, de Rainer-Maria Rilke, mais je m’en souffle” [It’s not about Vercingétorix, obviously, but Homer, Plato, Ovid, Montaigne, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Flaubert, Goethe, Heine, Shakespeare, RainerMaria Rilke, but I should take a breath] (Lopes 1999: 140). When Maunick asks Lopes during the interview, “Quelles sont vos exigences d’écrivain?” [What are your needs as a writer?], he replies, “Je pense que ce sont les mêmes que celles d’Homère ou de Shakespeare” [I think they are the same as they were for Homer or Shakespeare] (Maunick 1999: 129). In fact, whenever Lopes speaks of a world literature, he refers to European works. Lopes always insists on the involvement of the French in Francophonie because it seems, according to him, that this community cannot exist without the French. To enter into the Francophone community, the French must simply accept becoming Francophone, whereas Africans need

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perhaps to alter the manner in which they speak or write. When Lopes speaks about bringing institutional French closer to the everyday street French of the people in African countries, it is in actuality the people who must learn the institutional language of the bureaucrats instead of the opposite. In the speech given in Lyon, Lopes suggests that learning French can liberate Africans from oppressive, totalitarian regimes by granting them entrance into the global and democratic culture of Francophonie. However, do the citizens who learn “institutional French” to become a part of this community of writers and readers truly free themselves from oppression? Or does Lopes’s solution only replace one type of oppression with another? Lopes’s appeals to his audiences in The Laughing-Cry and “Multipolar Globalization and Francophonie” undermine his own anti-totalitarian project since he reproduces the same precise mechanisms as the totalitarian governments so thoroughly criticized in his text. For instance, Lopes states in his speech at the Université Jean Moulin: “La solidarité francophone doit être ressentie par les populations, au quotidien” [Francophone solidarity should be felt by populations on a daily basis] (Lopes 2001). According to Hannah Arendt, totalitarian regimes distinguish themselves by the manner in which they exert control over their citizens’ daily lives (Arendt 1973: 234). When Lopes describes Francophonie as a large family, his choice of metaphor only recalls the way in which Tonton imagines the nation as a grand family with himself as the father; Tonton says: “Moi, je suis le papa. Vous, vous êtes mes enfants. Tous les citoyens sont mes enfants” [I am the daddy. You, you are all my kids. All citizens are my kids] (Lopes 1982: 100). Given Lopes’s past candidacy for general secretary (the highest-ranking post) of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) [International Organization of Francophonie], did he envision this organization as an enormous family of which he would have been the father? Thus, the way in which Lopes describes his project seemingly undermines its very anti-totalitarian nature. In conclusion, the fragmented and polyphonic narration of The Laughing-Cry represents a Francophone culture while at the same time it seeks to enact it in the world by simultaneously addressing African and European audiences. The Francophone community that Lopes represents in the text is in fact similar to the one described in his political writings about Francophonie. Although he presents this community as being universal, it excludes in practice a large number of his compatriots, which contradicts its supposed democratic nature. Moreover, Lopes’s discourse on Francophonie contains Westernist, or even totalitarian, elements that imply that his universalist ideology is perhaps as dangerous as the

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totalitarianism he critiques. Nevertheless, perhaps the anti-totalitarian drive of The Laughing-Cry is not to be found in the representation and creation of a democratic culture via the narration, but in what Chemain calls the novel’s “procédé brechtien” [Brechtian technique] (Chemain 1988: 127).9 In his interview with Maunick, Lopes states that the “force du créateur c’est d’apporter un regard nouveau, inattendu sur la réalité à laquelle nous sommes le plus habitués” [the power of the creator is to bring a new, unexpected perspective to the reality that we are used to the most] (Maunick 1988, 46). Lopes hopes that the reader, after having finished The Laughing-Cry, “n’ait plus la même assurance” [no longer has the same assurance] (de Saivre 1982: 122) in reading newspapers, magazines and novels. Paradoxically, the Brechtian techniques in The Laughing-Cry make the reader wary of the ideas the novel presents—that is to say that the novel is capable of sowing doubt in the reader and, thereby, questions its very project. Perhaps this doubt is the true gift that this book has to offer readers: a culture capable of making dictatorships unthinkable.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Daniel Brant, a Ph.D. student in French at the University of Illinois, for his fine work in translating this essay from French into English.

Notes 1

See Koffi Anyinefa, “Postcolonial Postmodernity in Henri Lopes’ Le Pleurerrire”, Research in African Literatures 29.3(1998): 8-20. 2 This is the definition from the Petit Larousse (Paris: Larousse, 2003). 3 Francophonie is defined as a “linguistic community of Francophone countries”, “the set of Francophone countries” and “the collectivity formed by Frenchspeaking peoples” (Larousse). 4 I will return later to this distinction Lopes makes between an “institutional” French and a popular French. 5 I will return to this question later in this essay. 6 The dictator of DR Congo (Zaire) from 1965 to 1997. 7 In Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost, the author constantly compares the history of the Congo to those of Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States to facilitate comprehension for a Western audience. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998). 8 There are only two moments in The Laughing-Cry when Maître reveals his political leanings: “Mais les Tontons, quoiqu’en disent les Sonika, ont été des

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nullards à l’école. Ils se vengent aujourd’hui contre les bons élèves et les professeurs. Normal, non?” [The Tontons, despite what the Sonika say, were terrible in school. Today they take their revenge against the good students and the teachers. That’s normal, right?] (129) and “De quel droit, nous qui vivions à genoux au Pays, avalant tous les cacas des fesses de Tonton sans jamais élever un cri de protestation, quelquefois même en aidant le Guinarou dans son travail (suivez mon regard), de quel droit pouvions-nous nous poser en critiques de la démocratie des Oncles?” [What right do those of us who lived on bended-knee in the Country and who swallowed all of Tonton’s crap without ever protesting, instead, oftentimes, even helping the Guinarou (do you see what I’m saying?), what right do we have to pose as critics of Uncles’ democracy?] (260). 9 The theater of Bertolt Brecht offers the ideal metaphor for Lopes’s writing in The Laughing-Cry. According to Brecht, when the theatergoer is lost in the story represented on the stage, the spectacle hypnotizes him in the same way that Hitler’s speeches hypnotized the crowds. Brecht has actors step out of their roles during the production in order to avoid reproducing the dramatic illusion, which for him is the instrument of totalitarian regimes. The fragmented and polyphonic nature of The Laughing-Cry forces one to remain ever conscious of the fact that one is reading. This does not allow one to enter into the realist illusion that Brecht deemed so dangerous.

References Anyinefa, Koffi. “Postcolonial Postmodernity in Henri Lopes’ Le Pleurerrire.” Research in African Literatures 29.3(1998): 8-20. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau et Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Chemain, Arlette. “Henri Lopes, engagement civique et recherche d’une écriture.” Notre Librairie 92-93(1988): 123-128. de Saivre, Denise. “Entretien avec Henri Lopes.” Recherche, Pédagogie et Culture 59/60(1982): 120-122. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. Le Petit Larousse. Paris: Larousse, 2003. Lopes, Henri. Le Pleurer-rire. Paris: Présence africaine, 1982. —. “Mes trois identités.” Discours sur le métissage. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. —. “Mondialisation multipolaire et francophonie.” Discours prononcé à l’Université Jean Moulin, Lyon le 2 février 2001 (sur

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December 2013). Maunick, Édouard. “Le territoire d’Henri Lopes.” Notre Librairie 9293(1988): 127-131. Talansi, Marc. “Qui lit quoi au Congo?” Notre Librairie 92-93(1988): 192-198. Tansi, Sony Labou. L’État honteux. Paris: Seuil, 1981. Thomas, Dominic. Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Yewah, Emmanuel. “Dictatorship and the Press in Henri Lopes’ Le Pleurer-rire.” Ufahamu: Journal of the African Activist Association 18.1(1990): 82-90.

CHAPTER THREE POLYCENTRIC AESTHETICS THROUGH THE EMPOWERING LENS OF THE EMANCIPATED SUBALTERN: YAMINA BENGUIGUI’S INCH’ALLAH DIMANCHE EVELYNE LEFFONDRE-MATTHEWS MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

In the (not so distant) past, film studies were invariably concerned with theorizing national cinemas, and their sets of discrete well-established genres. Without a second thought, one would then classify and oppose documentaries to fiction, drama to comedy, locking each genre in neat spill-proof categories. Critics were also obviously keen on applying strict distinctions between “commercial” and “art house” cinema, and no one would have seriously dared question this dichotomy and its implied hierarchy. From the sixties through the eighties, new cinematic forms that emerged in the developing worlds tended to prompt speedy value judgments, and necessitated different theoretical tools. The development of Third Cinema theory (Solanas 1969, Gabriel 1982), most welcome at the time, however went on to adding fuel to polarizing and fixing cultures. Another tendency was to label all the productions from developing countries as “National Allegories” (Ahmad 1987 vs. Jameson 1986) thus nullifying all other possible reading. In addition, besides essentializing an East/West, or North/South dichotomy, disciplinary borders on every campus kept individual fields—such as media studies, social sciences, literary theory, francophone, postcolonial studies and others—in wellcompartmentalized areas, each endowed with its very high and sharply specialized, exclusive knowledge. And then came Ella Shohat and Robert Stam who, almost two decades ago, called for an urgent need to “multiculturalize and transnationalize” media studies (1994). In order to “decolonize global culture,” new media

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pedagogy was needed, and Unthinking Eurocentrism has, since, become an inescapable reference in film studies. Scholars were invited to tap into a widely interdisciplinary range of theories, so as to “make connections,” and were encouraged to further challenge the “canon” and to bypass prejudiced attitudes toward popular culture. Arbitrary divisions were thus to be fought on multiple fronts.1 Others have also called for more dialogue between academic fields, among them Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2002),2 or Françoise Lionnet with her enticement to generate a “cross-pollination” between postcolonial and francophone studies. She further invited researchers to think through a form of transnational feminism, calling for an “ethics of coalition and solidarity in a global context, [...] respectful of differences while arguing for universal human rights in a multicultural world” (2005: 262).3 This essay is an attempt to make a few more connections, by questioning some of the still prevailing arbitrary borders, taxonomies, presumed “authenticities,” dichotomies and hierarchies that run across our transnational landscape. In her introduction to Discursive Geographies,4 tying her definition to Roland Barthes’ notion of textuality, Jeanne Garane proposes that: “Literary and filmic texts can at once inscribe and produce place and space, and thereby participate in a form of geographic/cartographic discourse” (2005: 10). Indeed, although space has generally been defined as static, opposed to the dynamism of time, Gaston Bachelard refused to leave it at the mercy of the measurements and whims of the land surveyor: “L’espace saisi par l’imagination ne peut rester livré à la mesure et à la réflexion du géomètre” (1964: 17). Similarly, Michel Foucault later opted for “une désacralisation pratique de l’espace” inviting us to challenge taken for granted oppositions no one had yet dared question: “des oppositions admises comme données et auxquelles on n’avait pas encore osé toucher” (1984: 2). Edouard Glissant condemned globalization, but invited us to glimpse into “Worldness,” suggesting: “The idea of the world ought to be founded on the imagination of the world, intertwined poetics that would allow me to guess how my place connects to other places” (2002: 294).5 Why is it timely to reiterate these points? Even though migrations (voluntary or forced) are as old as our world, the movements of populations have in recent years become inevitably linked to the rapid technological advances in the media, and both phenomena must now be acknowledged as constantly interacting dynamic factors. As outlined by cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai: “[When] the story of mass migrations […] is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images […] we have a new order of instability in the production of modern

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subjectivities” (1996: 4). Appadurai further argues that at this time of rupture, moving images “create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continual salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes.” Ella Shohat and Robert Stam make a similar point: “In a transnational world typified by the global circulation of images and sounds, goods and people, the media impact complexly on national identity and communal belonging” (2003: 1). Precipitated by the “rupture” described by Appadurai, obvious disjunctions have entered the once unquestioned and self-contained concept of national identity. Benedict Anderson (whose work influenced, among others, Appadurai and Homi K. Bhabba) categorically denounced the flawed, artificially constructed conception of “national consciousness,” and the perpetuation of its myth through literature and the mass media. Besides, within Cinema studies, assigning a specific national identity to a given film has become very problematic when places of production, as well as authors and actors’ nationalities regularly largely spill over the frame of the “nation.” In his essay The National Revisited (2006), film theorist Paul Willemen, argues that nationalism seeks to bind people to “a never-quitefitting-straightjacket” by calling it “identity.”6 While concurring with Willemen, I suggest -following Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden’s definition of transnational cinema- that “One of the central aspects of transnationalism as a critical discourse is its dialectical engagement with – rather than simple rejection of—ideas of the national” (2006: 13). Along a similar thought process, I will argue that empowerment doesn’t have to signify “having taken exclusive power,” but rather, voicing and acting one’s subjectivity outside the straightjacket, (in terms of gender, ethnicity or other “would-be-identity-marker”). Poststructuralist and postmodernist analyses have challenged identities’ once presumed biological ‘naturalness’. Identities are now more generally recognized as “political, social, and historical, subject to cultural changes and historical circumstances, and not natural or transcendent in any way” (Codell 2007: 2). Finally, in an effort to further decolonize and depolarize imagination, the “periphery” doesn’t have to become the new “center,” hereby replacing the hegemonic prerogatives of the “old one” in a refashioned, reversed kind of ethnocentrism.

Diasporic Filmmaking in France The concept of diaspora signals processes of multi-locationality across geographical, cultural and psychic boundaries —Avtar Brah (2003: 625)7

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In the flux of these epistemological shifts, and inspired by the multiple contemporary questions raised around definitions of space, nation, home and identity in a postcolonial transcultural context, I will explore how these related concepts are imagined and translated in film. As the local and the global intersect and overlap evermore, contemporary diasporic authors are challenging the monolithic ways of thinking about identity, culture, geography, and history. As theorized by Hamid Naficy in An Accented Cinema, new forms of filmic expressions have emerged with the growing contribution of Postcolonial, Third World and other displaced authors living in the West (2001). While some (often metropolitan) theorists were busy eulogizing “the author,” social realism, and/or “Francophonie,” diasporic filmmakers have been finding ways of translating their personal experience of displacement into cinema, and among them, the ‘Beur-babyboomer’ generation in France. I will argue that while they continue projecting us towards “Unthinking Eurocentrism” and subverting the once prevalent anthropological gaze, new filmic productions by “displaced” creators from the francophone world may also move us toward the next step, that of “Decentering Francophonie.” Further considering the importance of infusing this study with feminine twists, I chose to concentrate on Yamina Benguigui’s first feature film: Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001). Prior to this production, films involving Franco-Maghrebi characters usually presented gang-bound male protagonists, most plots being set in the French urban peripheries. Benguigui’s originality was to offer a woman’s perspective on another woman, allegedly in homage to her own mother. The first image of the film; in the form of a didactic panel, reminds the viewer of the economic circumstances of the massive recruitment of foreign workers needed after World War II for the reconstruction of France’s infrastructure and industry. We then follow Zouina, a young Algerian mother leaving her country with her three children while chaperoned by her tyrannical mother in law. They are on their way to reunite with Zouina’s husband, in the North of France where he has been working for several years. Benguigui’s “fiction” links emotionally personal, autobiographical details, to the wave of Maghrebi women and children’s immigration that followed the politique de regroupement familial in the mid-seventies. Under Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency, worker immigration was suspended, and as “compensation,” the wives and children of those already living in France, were invited to join their husbands. Inch’Allah Dimanche will first be examined against the contemporary politico-socio-cultural context of 21st century France. Then, drawing on Naficy’s theory, and more specifically on what he refers to as “accented

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style,” the film will be analyzed through close readings of sequences that problematize the concepts of home and identity in relation to positions of power. Rather than subscribing to Third World Aesthetics, Shohat and Stam call for a “polycentric, dialogical, and relational analysis of visual cultures existing in relation with one another” (1994: 46-49). Glissant’s argument again comes to mind, that “a plural, multiplying, fragmented identity is no longer given or thought as a lack of identity but rather as a huge opening and new opportunity of breaking open closed gates” (2002: 288). I will outline how Benguigui offers new polycentric aesthetics, apt to defy the center/periphery binary as well as the anachronistic mental cartography of the postcolonial francophone world, making new crosscultural perspectives emerge, and opening up the debate in ways that eventually transcend polarities between “imagined communities.” Mythical representations of the “Other” and entrenched narratives of identity and history are revisited and turned on their heads through Benguigui’s authoritative lens, as she unearths fossilized chunks of collective memories, or counters negative stereotypes such as those of the victimized Maghrebi woman. Throughout this essay, I wish to underscore how, combining her political, historical, aesthetic, and social projects, Benguigui engages in a new kind of dialectic, opening up dialogues between France, the Maghreb, and her variegated francophone audience.

Revisiting the “Contact Zone” I like to call “contact” zones” social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, lavery, or their aftermaths, as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. —Mary Louise Pratt (1991:33)

Today, in France, although we may certainly witness a wave of infatuation with world cultures and an opening to cultural hybridity, a debate around National identity still polarizes large parts of the French population.8 It seems that the myths around which individual and collective consciousness were scaffolded and radicalized remain alive and kicking, essentializing alterity in some “naturally” hierarchical connection, and perpetuating the legitimacy of borders once erected for politicoeconomic gains. As reminded by Abdelkader Benali, this polarization of cultures has been widely perennialized since colonial times, by plastic Arts, literature, and Cinema, on both sides of the colonization’s divide:

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“Le cinéma colonial français est l’un de ces lieux du discours ayant participé de manière active à la cristallisation de l’aventure coloniale en terme d’imagerie et de mythes, impliquant aussi bien les colonisateurs que les colonisés” (1998: 16). From the colonial discourse, which in the name of “civilizing mission” placed and kept the “Colonized” in a subaltern position, subsists a binary vision of human history that, to this day, still tends to justify hierarchies and barriers between communities.9 Besides, the myth surrounding the concept of “Nation,” as denounced by Benedict Anderson, is in France enhanced by the Jacobin myth of the Republic, leading to exclusion and stigmatizing all failure of assimilation, notwithstanding the degree of arrogance implied in such expectation. Regardless of their French government-issued identity card, people of Maghrebi origin are yet today often “confined to the imaginary, physical, or administrative boundaries of one nation, one culture, one language, and one religion.”10 The very diverse French society must indeed re-imagine and redefine itself, in spite of invasive negative media coverage of the problems inherent to the dreaded “banlieues,” which tends, through fear, to legitimize exclusions and to exacerbate the symptoms of a bipolar identity crisis. Mireille Rosello perfectly summarizes here a process, which, without concerted effort, will endlessly reproduce the same “history.” The violence of some historical context makes any initial encounter with another subject almost impossible. No first encounter can ever take place when history, language, religion and culture exert such pressures upon the protagonists of the encounter that their desire to speak or be silent is trapped by preexisting, prewritten dialogues and scenarios (2005: 1)

Rosello argues that, in order to derail this process, new protocols are necessary. They are what she calls performative encounters, “a type of encounter that coincides with the creation of new subject positions rather than treating preexisting (pre-imagined) identities as the reason for, and justification of, the protocol of encounter—whether it is one of violence or trust, respect or hostility”(2005: 1). Yamina Benguigui’s political agenda and work as a filmmaker follow Rosello’s vision on how to shake such myths or pre-established narratives by offering new discourses that refuse to reproduce two camps representing two countries torn by a war of colonization. The kind of discourse Benguigui offers is dialogical. First exposing the status quo quality of the conflicts and polarities between the two “communities” as a background to her narrative, she then initiates “new protocols,” playing against this binaristic scenario in an attempt to work out the tensions.

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Through close readings of Inch’Allah Dimanche, I will argue how, in the cineaste’s postcolonial and feminist treatment of space, the latter becomes almost a character in the plot, a metaphor to help reposition or reterritorialize her Maghrebi-French-woman protagonist Zouina in a geographic discourse. In order to analyze this specific feature in the scenario, I will attempt to contrive space, as fluid and elusive as it is, into (not-so-neat perhaps, sometimes overlapping) categories that should fit our purpose.

The Passage In the opening scene, a hand-held shot takes us inside a crowd along a slowly moving line. It has a “cinéma-vérité” feel to it, the 35 mm further giving a sense of amateurish home video. From a high angle, anonymous feet and hands are pushing suitcases, while passports are handed out to a customs officer. The intimate quality of the medium close-up travelling shot allows us to be invisible witnesses, members of the anonymous waiting crowd. The camera then frames Zouina’s face and lingers on her features, while her daughter leans over the officer’s desk. As the latter tells the girl to move back and asks who the children are, Aïcha promptly replies in Arabic that they are her son’s children. The man then points to Zouina with a quick head gesture, inquiring who she is, to which Aïcha automatically responds she is her son’s wife. Thus are identified and objectified the young woman and her children who, although the camera focuses successively in close up on each of them, remain mute during this exchange. The tight shot composition and fragmentary framing, as well as the vertical and horizontal lines of the gates and the narrow funnel-like controlled passage give a feeling of “claustrophobia and agoraphobia,” which according to Naficy, are components of accented, exilic cinema. In addition, in a spatiotemporal form, the white gate starkly divides the picture into two separate territories, which apart from outlining the administrative border, also signify a “before” the checkpoint, and an “after.” While the passengers are embarking one by one on the ferry, a loud scream rises, tearing apart the so far quiet and orderly exodus scene. A reverse shot, reveals that the howling sound comes from behind a high black metal gate, against which an older woman in a dazzlingly white djellaba cries out to her daughter Zouina. Torn between her mother’s supplications not to abandon her, and threats from her mother in law to take the children away from her, Zouina finally embarks with them, in tears, signaling the irreversibility of this passage. The chaos then subsides

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as the ship unmoors, the extradiegetic soundtrack broadcasting the soothing voice of the Kabyle singer Idir. The scene’s allegorical quality is reinforced by a play on shots/reverse shots giving us to contemplate two perspectives: that of those who stay behind watching the passengers on the deck getting smaller and smaller between alternating shots, and that of the passengers on board, watching Algiers fading in the same way in the distance. In comparison to the fragmented style of the first images with harsh contrasts, the panoramic circular view of the white city incrementally shrinking, melting into warm and light tones of surrounding golden waters, may suggest hope for the future. In addition, the individual painful experience seems to have merged into that of a whole community, possibly allowing to transcend the personal trauma.

Liminal Spaces and Mobile Spaces

Illustration 3-1. Outside the railway station in Saint Quentin. Reproduced with permission, courtesy, © Bandits

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Naficy observed that exilic border spaces and border crossings are inscribed in fixed sites such as airports, seaports, railway stations, “which act as portals to other places and times” (2001: 238). A jump cut elliptically transports the family all the way to Northern France in Saint Quentin, outside the railway station, which, like the port of Algiers, functions as a “portal” (3-1). The camera carefully frames this defining liminal space: The first image, in shades of grey contrasting greatly with the previous sequence, is a close up of a train-station clock announcing the morning hour of 8:30, a sign underneath it spelling out the name of the town. A wide-angle reverse shot, in soft focus, reveals the shriveled up family sitting on a bench—at the center of the frame—the place being otherwise deserted. Visibly cold and tired: everyone is glancing off screen. To the right within the frame, another signpost is attached to a robust vertical pole. The top section warns that the space is reserved for taxis, while the bottom part that reads: “stationnement gênant”—further illustrated by a car being towed away—ironically sounds like a threat.11 However, a medium close up shot from a low angle suddenly focuses on the crisp, triumphant smile of Aïcha the matriarch, implicitly announcing the arrival of her son. The following reverse shot is not precisely the one we would expect though, as instead of Aïcha’s perspective of her son, both the image and soundtrack support Zouina’s subjective gaze (3-2). We first discover in close up, a pair of shiny black shoes—stepping off a van still off screen—and then as the camera tilts up closely on Ahmed’s body to his face, the young woman’s voice over reveals her thoughts: “J’avais oublié qu’il avait une moustache,”12 somehow implying a lack of intimacy between the two, harbinger of the days to come. Benguigui plays with genres: the shoe shot is briefly evoking a film noir and moves on to a more comedic style. Vehicles such as trains, buses, cars, and also suitcases, all symbols of displacement, are ubiquitous in accented cinema as is the case in Inch’Allah Dimanche. They are what Naficy calls “Mobile spaces.” The journeys these vehicles allow the protagonist and viewer to embark upon are not simply geographical: Since these vehicles travel through countryside and wide-open spaces and between countries, there is always a dialectical relationship in the accented films between the inside closed spaces of the vehicles and the outside open spaces of nature and nation. Inexorably, vehicles provide not only empirical links to geographic places and social groupings but also metaphoric reworkings of notions of traveling, homing, and identity. (2001: 257)

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Illustration 3-2. Zouina’s subjective gaze on Ahmed’s arrival, courtesy, © Bandits

The next sequence—which takes the whole family home—illustrates the very point made above by Naficy. But first, let us say that during the affectionate reuniting episode between Aïcha, her son and the children at the station, Zouina has remained mute and almost invisible, left in the background as though having merely a walk-on part in the story. Once in the van however, the camera focuses at length in close up on the profile of the young woman’s face framed by the window constellated with raindrops. A dialectical relationship between inside and outside translates through Zouina’s features as they change, albeit almost imperceptibly, during this short journey. At first, her eyes are closed and the weather seems to be a synecdoche of her mental state. However, as she opens up her eyes to the rainy landscape, her increasingly subjective gaze metaphorically appears to translate her mental “reworkings of notions of traveling, homing, and identity” (2001: 257), suggesting a refusal to be victimized, and outlining Benguigui’s will to challenge the stereotype that all Muslim women’s bear entire submission to the patriarchal order. As the family has arrived in front of the house, they start unloading the van, when another vehicle, a local bus, appears. A bus stop is actually just

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across from the house, and the vehicle will be pausing there regularly. Later in the film, it is the very bus that Zouina will be boarding herself, expressing an even more defining “reworking of identity” (3-3).

Illustration 3-3. Zouina’s bus ride home later on, her wounded hand wrapped in her scarf, courtesy, © Bandits

Meanwhile, this initial encounter triggers Ahmed’s first burst of irritation when, becoming aware of the driver’s glancing at his wife, he subsequently, orders her directly into the house. The unloading of the van resumes, with close-up panning shots of hands carrying numerous boxes and suitcases, containers that will join others already piled up inside the house, symbols of a precarious, temporary lifestyle.

Segregated Gendered Space Different viewers will naturally perceive Ahmed’s reaction very differently. The above arrival scene establishes the incompatibility between two social organizations, the very dichotomy Benguigui is exposing in order to eventually better open up the debate on this issue. Ahmed had been living as a single man in France for several years, and he

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is suddenly faced with a new, seemingly unanticipated situation. In Maghrebi society, the extended family model is the norm, as are segregated spaces. Even though we will see how well-prepared Ahmed was as far as his children’s needs are concerned (he has already bought all the necessary clothing and school supplies for them), he is somewhat unprepared to having his wife live with him in France. Prior to her arrival, his dealing with acculturation had only been an individual concern and reality. As a matter of fact, it appears that he had built strong homosocial relationships while living at the “foyer,” as is obvious through his exchanges with the friend he calls “the Pole.” His newly retrieved responsibility as sole guardian of the family’s honor includes a whole new personal challenge, never experienced back home where—we might say—the extended family took care of itself. Complying with the rules of decency (hachouma) is not as problematic in the Maghreb where gender segregation has been traditionally imposed for centuries. Unlike the French typical nuclear family where the couple is autonomous and whose ties are based on affection, the patrilineal foundations of the extended Maghrebi family exclude the autonomy of the couple, and require a collective organization of the community along gender lines. As outlined by Camille Lacoste-Dujardin: In the process of immigration small families were formed, restricted to a nuclear form of family life which was traditionally proscribed, where the interpersonal relationships are deprived of any recourse to a family group of the same sex. The parents thus find themselves faced with a new relationship, reduced to an unforeseen duality, which is difficult for them to manage in the absence of the nuclear family project (2000: 62).

Both Zouina and her husband, each in their own traditionally gendered prescribed way, express their need to fill a socio-cultural gap. Ahmed forcefully opposes what Lacoste-Dujardin calls “counter-culturation,” or an “attempted enforcement of Maghrebi culture” (2000: 66), while Zouina will soon launch her personal attempt to try and rebuild a community of “sisters.” She does not so much resent the rules of infiçal (gender segregation) as her lack of contact with other women, being now denied the kind of social life and group solidarity she is traditionally entitled to. The plot is thereafter built around her quest, which takes place over three weeks. Three Sundays in a row, Zouina will escape from the house to try and find Malika, another local young Algerian woman she has heard of, and that she expects to befriend. One main motif in Inch’Allah Dimanche is the lingering tension between inside and outside. Ironically, the reason why Zouina first transgresses the boundary of the house and ventures out

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into the forbidden public space is to connect with another Algerian family for the Aïd celebration, as tradition, which includes offering homemade cakes to one’s neighbors, could then, paradoxically, be respected.13 Benguigui continuously works at challenging borders, and implicitly questions the presumably fixed binary between public and private spaces. Deleuze et Guattari have outlined the protean nature of concepts, as they are drawn into “becoming,” and Mohammadbagher Forough, following their perspective, revisits the public/private distinction in a transnational context.14 “The space between the individual qua individual and the individual qua member of the public is a zone of neighborhood, the boundaries of which can never be settled once and for all.”15 (2010:8) Publicness can be a relative, porous and shifting concept in relation to its constituent members.

Domestic Space Throughout the film, Benguigui problematizes the notion of home, a traditionally feminine space world-round. Paradoxically, Zouina—whose status is limited to that of “mother of her husband’s children”—is not allowed to manage the domestic space in her new home. As soon as the family moves in, Aïcha requires that her son install a lock on the pantry. As the sole keeper of the key, she will have full control of the groceries, especially over the sugar and coffee. Instead of a new home, the house becomes a prison for Zouina. The carceral, claustrophobic feel—another feature of diasporic cinema according to Naficy—is rendered through the use of different angles and by picture compositions, which typically include a frame (or frames) inside that of the screen (3-4). The space so defined is fragmented, lacks depth, and it seems that there is not enough room to move or step back to see everything. The exterior walls as well as the interior ones are always visible, accentuating the sensation of being in a cell, and confirming the restrictions imposed on Zouina even within her “home.” Moreover, instead of being a place of refuge and safety, the house is where she gets verbally abused and beaten when she is considered to be guilty of transgression. Doors and windows are pervasive in virtually every shot. Whenever the other adult family members are present, the young woman generally appears in a doorframe, sometimes half-hidden behind a curtain in the background. Aïcha usually occupies center stage, either sitting like a queen on a throne as a low angle shot emphasizes her domineering personality and attitude, or walking back and forth across the whole frame of the screen, as

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she does in the kitchen upon her arrival, signaling her taking ownership of the space. During this time, the young mother and her children remain together, as a unit on the threshold.

Illustration 3-4. Access to the domestic space of the new home, courtesy, © Bandits

Zouina is however responsible for, and does take care of domestic tasks, mostly chores imposed on her and that she must complete in a very specific and timely fashion. Unlike Cinderella though, when she gets accused of not doing her job well enough or fast enough, although she doesn’t say a word, her body language and the camera work are obvious clues to her inner thoughts: while Aïcha is still sitting proudly on her sheepskin throne, waiting to be brought the peeled vegetables to finish cutting them up into the pan, she is now seen from a high angle, Zouina standing and passing tall between her and the camera, ironically reversing the perspective of powers between the two women. A gesture of impatience from Zouina, who ends up practically throwing the remaining ingredients at her mother-in-law, further shows her determination to not accept abuse from her.

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On (Post)colonial Space and Hospitality and the Monolingualism of the “Other” The house in Saint Quentin is sandwiched between two similar attached homes, as an omniscient wide-angle crane shot will soon reveal to us. Mr. and Mme Donze—caricatures of an older français moyen couple— live on one side, while Nicole, a young and friendly single woman who works at the local cosmetics factory, occupies the other. Again, the film is historically situated in the mid-seventies, at the height of the feminist movement in France, making Nicole’s character culturally and socially relevant in more than one way. The sequence in which we first meet the Donze couple, functions as to represent the postcolonial status quo relationship between Algeria and France after the former’s independence. An eye-level front shot follows Aïcha coming out through the back door into the yard, and cuts to a lowangle shot to witness the couple upstairs, framed inside their closed, lacedcurtained window. The next cut to a high angle reverse shot confirms their staring voyeuristically at Aïcha, with Mme Donze growing more and more suspicious, commenting disparagingly on the unwelcome presence of the uncivilized-looking, newly expanded next-door family. In an ironic twist, the camera then takes its own turn at voyeurism. As a counterpoint to Mme Donze suspicious attitude towards her neighbors, the omniscient lens captures the lady obsessing over her garden project or repeatedly spying on her neighbors while hiding behind her lacy curtains (3-5). We are introduced to the Donze’s home, and although the building is basically identical to their neighbor’s house, the contrast is obvious in the way it is meticulously furnished and decorated, as opposed to the décor of piled-up suitcases and boxes at Zouina’s. Similarly contrasted are their preoccupations, Mme Donze’s priorities revolving around winning the prize for best looking garden. The voyeuristic camera lets us become privy to her pathological fears that her chances have been ruined by the fateful “intrusion” next-door. The first real encounter between the two families takes place when Zouina, outside in her yard, is preparing to boil some water for coffee on a little portable stove. Shocked by such audacity, Mme Donze starts gesturing, articulating exaggeratingly “vous n’avez pas le droit de faire ça ici”, continuing in “baby French” so that the woman she assumes to be monolingual-Arabic-illiterate-and-definitely-uncivilized may understand that, in this modern country, coffee is made inside the house.16

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Illustration 3-5. M. and Mrs. Donze’s voyeuristic glance, courtesy, © Bandits

The conversation soon involves Aïcha, now perched and gesticulating from her upstairs window, while arguing in Arabic. Hearing the word kawa, Mme Donze—proud to know two words in Arabic—replies: “C’est pas la casbah ici… le café… maison!” To which Aïcha switches to French, further elaborating “oui c’est la casbah, c’est la casbah de mon fils… pas contente?”17 The dispute is interrupted when Nicole shows up, blaming Mme Donze for lacking respect towards older people. Shaking Zouina’s hand over the fence, Nicole introduces herself to the young woman, who—not having yet said a word since leaving Algiers and her mother— now voices her own name for her neighbor, the sequence ending thus on a socially positive note. Several sequences illustrate how the rules of hospitality may differ from one culture to another. Even though sharing coffee would obviously seem a universal way of socializing, Benguigui shows how this simple act can become a source of antagonism. Aside from where coffee should be made (from Mme Donze’s perspective: inside), we learn from Aïcha who should make and serve it, and how to drink it: with sugar, signaling good taste, and in acknowledgement to the generosity of the host. Nicole preferring hers unsweetened almost offends Aïcha, who, according to her

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own sense of hospitality, visibly translates the young woman’s response as inappropriate behavior.18 Another crisis soon starts brewing between Mme Donze and Zouina. the conflict ending in a fight. While the children are playing outside, and in spite of Mme Donze’s menacing warnings insisting that “here,” playing ball is forbidden by law, their red ball inadvertently falls into her perfectly manicured garden. Notwithstanding the fact that her flowers remained unscathed, she starts calling the children assassins and throat-cutters, tearing their ball to shreds with her garden shears. Zouina then not only crosses into her neighbor’s garden, but she jumps at the throat of her now declared enemy, and while undressing to her more comfortable underclothes, she proceeds to beat her up. To punctuate her victory, she seizes one of Mme Donze’s cherished ceramic lawn statuette—a coq— otherwise known as an iconic symbol of French nationalism. Nevertheless, after Aïcha later describes the fight scene to her son, poor Zouina will, herself, be severely beaten for provoking such an abominable scandal and for transgressing all the rules of decency.19

Performative Encounters through Radio Waves Benguigui’s lens does not however only emphasize the polarization and incompatibilities between the two neighbors. Two sequences placed at intervals between the argument and fight scenes reach much less divisive conclusions. In both cases, we see Zouina in her kitchen, listening intently to a radio program. In the first case: le jeu des mille francs. While the diegetic sound track—the voice of Lucien Jeunesse, the famous gameshow host—remains uninterrupted, a cut in the filmed sequence, takes us from Zouina’s kitchen to Mme Donze living room, where the woman is listening just as attentively to the same show. A later sequence features another radio program particularly popular among women in the seventies, in which the host, Ménie Grégoire, takes calls and gives advice to listeners on romantic and sexual relationships (36, 3-7). Once again, the radio waves link the two listeners in a common pleasurable moment, albeit in their separate spaces. These two sequences may also function reflexively, suggesting the possible social value and benefits of popular culture, and outlining how radio and film function as liminal virtual places, mediating inside/outside, public/private, into a hybrid space of encounter.

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Illustrations 3-6. 3-7 Zouina and Mme Donze listening to Ménie Grégoire, courtesy, © Bandits

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Space of Mourning M an nd the Opeen Image As a couunterpoint to thhe belligerentt incident invoolving Mme Donze D and Zouina in thheir microcosm mic reenactment of coloniaal boundaries crossing, Benguigui llater offers—iin a threefold d episode—neew perspectives on the Algerian waar. Using “chrronotopical” forms f of aesthhetics, she sub bverts the habitual spaace/time framee traditionally y used to recoount historicaal “facts,” by creating a fragmentedd narrative th hat opens up polycentric dialogical d points of viiew, thus brinnging togetheer characters that time, sp pace, and politics shouuld keep apartt. On the first Sunday, Zouiina leaves thee house in secret with her childrenn, hoping to find the Bouuira family and a have someone to share the upccoming Aïd celebration c wiith. However,, she gets lost and ends up in a war w cemetery.. As she starrts crying, a different, unexpected woman miraculously appeears to comfoort her: Mme Manant, the widow of a French officer o killed in Algeria. T This creative narrative opens up a new, unknown protocol, and a chancce to derail otherwise o fossilized diichotomies. This T encounterr is of the “pperformative” type, the kind encourraged by Miireille Rosello who actuaally describess it as a “ghostly enncounter”: “thhe story enablles not only the dead butt also the living to traansgress subjeect-positions that t normally prevent the encounter e from takingg place at alll” (2005: 143 3). A tragic eevent occurs however (second foldd), while the two women are conversinng. Zouina’s children, having receiived permissioon to play witth Mme Manaant’s dog, takee him too close to thee road wheree he gets killed. Benguiguui seems to throw t the narrative baack into a pre-existing scen nario, only to imagine a way out of the (now prresumably) innevitable defin nitive fall outt between thee women. Instead, Zouuina will provvide the dog with a properr burial in heer garden, which, althoough it cannott bring closuree to the widow w’s double lo oss, offers help in her mourning proocess. Her hu usband’s bodyy was never retrieved, r the remainss assumed to still be in th he mountains of Kabylia; however, there is now w a gravesite, a memorial place p symboliizing her losses, and it happens to bbe in the gardden of an Algerian woman in France.20 In I studies on how peeople deal with w traumaticc experiencess and memo ories, the psychoanalyytic notion of o “displacem ment,” originaally conceiveed of by Freud, is a useful conceept.21 As has been argued,, “the imposssibility of finding a plaace of articulaation redoublees the loss caaused by violeence,” the fact that “it hhas taken placce but neverth heless lacks a pplace. 22 As a thirrd fold to this mourning process, p the tw wo women meet m again the followinng Sunday att Mme Manan nt’s home, w where the perfformative encounter, including thhe dead and d the livingg, resumes with its multilayeredd, crowded naarrative, denyin ng univocal m meaning.

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The conversation between the two women is inaudible and the multimedia “clues” are elsewhere, although appearing to clash. Framed photographs of the dead officer (a silent face) compete with the extradiegetic soundtrack, the song in Berber of a Moudjahid tortured in Kabylia (a faceless voice), the lyrics being translated in the subtitles. As perfectly described by Rosello: We are clearly expected to be torn between several layers of interpretation, like historians confronted with multiple and contradictory archival data […]. We are supposed to be confused, to be uncomfortable, and to make decisions. (2005: 148-149)

Such sequences belong to what has elsewhere been termed “open image,” as found in Italian neorealism and in the French new wave. These ambiguous images, necessitating different levels of translation, can be difficult to decipher, but their impact upon the viewer has a lingering effect. As stated by Chaudhuri and Finn: The term “image” encompasses shot, frame and scene, and includes sound components—open images may deploy any of these elements. [...] While watching a film one may meet them with some resistance—yet they have the property of producing virtual after-images in the mind.23

Pasolini’s Poetic Neorealism, and Deleuze’s theory of the time-image have identified signs and techniques common to the “open image.” Although Chaudhuri and Finn’s article focuses on the New Iranian Cinema, their intention is also “to draw structural and aesthetic comparisons across different national cinemas,” and to show how “the ostensibly apolitical aesthetics form of the open image” recalls a “repressed political dimension” (2007: 388). The poetic quality of neorealism further allows filmmakers more freedom, away from hegemonic versions of “reality”

When does a Location become Home? “Quand les cîmes de notre ciel se rejoindront ma maison aura un toit.” —Paul Eluard, Dignes de vivre (1941:115)24

Avtar Brah rightly distinguishes between “homing desire” and desire for a “homeland,” since “not all diasporas sustain an ideology of ‘return’.” (2003: 615) Indeed, as we follow Zouina’s transformation, it becomes clear that what she craves is a place that would provide her with a sense of

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safety and belonging, not just as a physical shelter. It should be both a private and a social space, in which she could invest affectively, helping situate herself in the community she now lives in.

Illustration 3-8. Vast field of greens awaking Zouina’s senses, courtesy, © Bandits

Laura U. Marks, writing on “intercultural cinema,” argues that disjunctions in time and space that characterize diasporic experience may emerge in film through an appeal to non-visual knowledge, when images reactivate the experiences of the senses such as touch, smell, and taste. (38) Marks suggest that these “haptic images” “invite the viewer to respond in an intimate, embodied way, and thus facilitate the experience of other sensory impressions as well” (2000: 2). Interestingly, Marks realized (after the fact) that the original films, which had laid grounds to her theory, all had in common a missing/missed mother. Likewise, Zouina misses her own at the outset, and holds on to her through the reactivation of sensual experiences. She smells, while in a vast field of greens on her first secret outing, the feel of soft fabrics, as she undresses in her room, the feel and scent of flour on her face, when she bakes for the family, all open up her inner thoughts for the viewer. (3-9)

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Illustration 3-9. Zouina’s portable sensorium, courtesy, © Bandits

Whenever she is by herself or with her daughter, Zouina’s feelings and desires emerge through her interaction with her new environment. In the sequence where she is hanging her freshly washed laundry with the help of her daughter, obviously replaying a scene from her own childhood, the soundtrack bringing back the voice of the Kabyle singer Idir further enhances the link across space and generations. As the film progresses, Zouina’s taking care of her own daughter seems to strengthen her position as a subject, incrementally translating expressions of her emancipation, and the eventual fulfillment of her homing desire. I will add that her “portable sensorium” helps her to feel more “at home in the world,” and also helps the viewer connect to such hybrid space.25 The veil or “foulard” has been a polemical topic in France for several years. Benguigui has made it into a polysemic, multifunctional object, able to secure different needs as they arise. It is the scarf Zouina wears on her head during the journey, but it also serves as a bandage to wrap her bleeding hand with, and a becomes a comforting soft blanket to protect and sooth her daughter from her grief (3-10).

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Illustration 3-10. Polysemy of the veil, courtesy, © Bandits

In this coming-of-age story, the dramatic outcome that follows her visit to Malika reveals that Zouina may not find a sense of home within her own “imagined”community. Even though both women may embody similar positions at times, they definitely each occupy different subject positions. Zouina’s most desperate gesture, breaking Malika’s closed window with her fist, becomes in fact a symbolic, visceral, unexpected, defining moment. The issues of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, do not produce easily anticipated syntheses, and like “creolization” their becoming is “unforeseeable.” Rewinding back to the very beginning of this long essay, I will once more bring Edouard Glissant and Benguigui closer, mentioning that the latter received criticism for mixing “genres,” and quoting the former: The explosion of the world totality and the eruption of audio-visual techniques have opened up the field to an infinite variety of possible genres that we cannot even imagine. In the meantime, the poetics of the world combine genres and reinvent them. (2002: 294)

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Notes 1

Drawing on Bakhtin, the concept of Critical dialogism has inspired many, such as Robert Stam, Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer, James Clifford, Gilles Deleuze, branching out to Glissant et Chamoiseau, among others. 2 See Beyond Dichotomies, Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization. 2002. Edited by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi : State University of New York Press 3 See Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. 2005. Edited by H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donadey : University Press of Florida 4 Discursive Geographies: Writing Space and Place in French, 2005. Edited by Jeanne Garane . Amsterdam, New-York : Rodopi 5 See also Jean Jacques Alcandre, L’espace-temps Caribéen (2011) 6 Willemen makes this distinction: [T]here is a diametrical opposition between identity and subjectivity. The former, being what the institutionally orchestrated practices of address seek to impose, constitutes a never-quite-fitting straightjacket; […] Subjectivity always exceeds identity, since identity formation consists of trying to pin “us” to a specific, selected subset of the many diverse clusters of discourses we traverse in our lifetimes, and that stick to us to varying degrees. […] Some aspects of our subjectivity may be occupied or hijacked by the national identity modes of address, but there always are dimensions within our sense of “subjective individuality” that escape and exceed any such identity straightjacket. (2006: 30-31) 7 Avtar Brah also proposes the “creolisation of theory” (2003:631). 8 Under Sarkozy’s presidency, a Ministry of National Identity was actually created in 2007. For the next three years, it was led by Brice Hortefeux and then Eric Besson, but eventually dissolved under criticism from the left. 9 See also Glissant: “Wherever founding myths appear […] the notion of identity grows around the axis of filiation and legitimacy, which gives no room to the Other as a participant” (2002: 289). 10 Rosello, Mireille. 2005:1. France and the Maghreb : Performative Encounters : University Press of Florida 11 [parking “undesirable] 12 [I had forgotten he had a moustache] 13 There are numerous intertextual references in Benguigui’s works, and I will try to briefly mention one example. In her book Mémoires d’immigrés l’héritage maghrébin, she recalls and relates a personal Aïd story. As a thirteen-year-old girl growing up herself in a northern French town, she was sent to the neighbors with the customary gift of cakes. Her mother insisted that Yamina specify if was from her uncle Moussah, following the tradition to honor the memory of a deceased family member. As the obedient little girl did as she was told, the elected neighbor sent her away, saying she didn’t even know this uncle of hers. Yamina thought to herself “well, of course, he’s dead…” and did not further insist. She tried a different house the following year, without more success. When her younger sister was asked to go on a similar mission a year later, both girls decided to not even

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bother, and walked instead to an empty lot, where they buried the cakes (1997: 182). 14 See Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Editions de Minuit, 1991 15 “zone de voisinage” for Deleuze (1991:25) 16 [You are not allowed to do this here] 17 [Yes indeed, this is my son’s house… you not happy?] 18 On the topic of hospitality in Franco-Maghrebi context, see the rich analysis of Rosello “Gender, Hospitality and Cross-Cultural Transactions in Les passagers du Roissy Express and Mémoires d’immigrés. Eds Freedman and Tarr, (2000:135151) Also, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest, 2001, Stanford 19 Zouina will be treated again just as harshly later, for having accepted gifts from her new friends: beauty products from Nicole and a book on Algeria from Mme Manant. 20 Interestingly, one of the missions Benguigui worked on when she was an Assistant to the Mayor of Paris was to develop the number of cemetery plots allotted to Franco-Maghrebi. 21 See Diaspora and Memory (2007:14) 22 ibid. (Altounian: 29) 23 See “The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema.” Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn (2007: 388) 24 Cited in Bachelard, “Maison et Univers”, La poétique de l’Espace (1964:51) [When the summits of our skies will meet, my house will have a roof]. 25 See Rodaway, Paul. Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. London: Routledge, 1994.

References Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’”, Social Text, No. 17 (Autumn, 1987): 3-25 Alcandre, Jean-Jacques, “L’espace-temps caribéen”, Les Cahiers du GEPE, N°3/ 2011. Hors champ (2011). December 2013. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso, 2006 [1983]. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de l’espace. Paris: PUF, 1964 [1957]. Bakhtine, Mikhaïl. Esthétique et théorie du roman. Gallimard 1978 [1975]. Baronian, Marie-Aude, Stephan Besser and Yolande Jansen, eds. Diaspora and Memory. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Benali, Abdelkader. Le cinéma colonial au Maghreb. Paris: Cerf, 1998.

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Benguigui, Yamina. Mémoires d’immigrés, l’héritage maghébin. Paris: Canal + Editions, 1997. Bhabha, Homi. “Dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation.” In Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1989. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996 —. “Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory, a Reader. Eds Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, New York: Routledge, 2003 Codell, Julie F., ed. Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema: an Anthology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. L’image mouvement. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983. —. L’image temps. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort. Paris: Galilée, 1997. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden, eds. Transnational Cinema, the film reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Foucault, Michel. Des espaces autres. Hétérotopies, Dits et écrits. Paris: PUF, 1984. Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982. Garane, Jeanne, ed. Discursive Geographies: Writing Space and Place in French. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2005. Gilroy, Paul. "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack": The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson, 1987. Glissant, Edouard. “Approches” in Poétique de la relation [Poetics of Relation]. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]. —. Tout-Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. —. “The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World.” In Elisabeth MudimbeBoyi ed. Beyond Dichotomies, Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Jameson, Fredric “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986): 65-88. Lacoste-Dujardin, Camille. “Maghrebi Families in France.” In Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr, eds. Women, Immigration and Identities in France. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Lionnet, Françoise. “Francophonie, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms.” In H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donadey, eds.

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Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Mludimbe-Boyi, Elisabeth, ed. Beyond Dichotomies, Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Mohammadbagher, Forough. Revisiting the Public/Private Distinction: A Deleuzian Perspective. Interdisciplinary Press, 2010. December 2013. Murdoch, H. Adlai and Anne Donadey, eds. Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Rosello, Mireille. France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: the Immigrant as guest. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam, eds. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. Rutgers University Press, 2003. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the media. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Solanas, Fernando. 1969. Towards a Third Cinema.

December 2013. Willemen, Paul and Valentina Vitali, eds. Theorizing National Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2006.

PART III: PERFORMING FRANCOPHONIE: TEXT, MUSIC, AND THE ARTS

CHAPTER FOUR FOREIGNNESS IN LANGUAGE, FOREIGNNESS OF LANGUAGE BRIAN MCLOUGHLIN NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Voilà, je le redis pour la centième fois, si jamais vous avez manqué le début : je veux être pris pour un écrivain, et les seuls adjectifs acceptables dans ce cas-là sont : un bon écrivain (ce qualificatif a bien entendu ma préférence) ou un mauvais écrivain. Here, I’ll say it for the hundredth time, in case you missed the beginning: I want to be seen as a writer, and the only acceptable adjectives for this are: a good writer (this of course being my preferred qualitative) or a bad writer. —Dany Laferrière (my translation) (Laferrière 2010: 107)

Dany Laferrière, a Haitian who writes in French and lives in Québec could be said to fit three ways into la francophonie. However, he refuses to be categorized as a Francophone and prefers to be a writer without borders, without any distinction other than that of being a writer. Yet others attempt to define him, not just in terms of literature, but, linguistically, culturally and racially. In his first novel How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, a novel based loosely on his life, Dany Laferrière describes and recounts the life of a young black man living in Québec writing his first novel. Through this character, Laferrière shows how a black man, like the author himself living in Montreal and writing about Québec in Québécois, is seen as a foreigner because of the color of his skin, a theme that the title of the novel explicitly evokes. In this analysis of How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (1987) (Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), I will show how Dany Laferrière from Haiti has succeeded in producing a

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novel that, containing many Québécois qualities, can be described as Québécois, but that Laferrière draws from other traditions and influences, freeing himself from the boundaries set by being defined as a Québécois, Haitian, or even as a French language writer. Laferrière’s writing can ultimately be described as a part of a world literature movement, or as Martin Munro would put it “a one-literary movement” (Munro 2005: 176). Put simply, he is just a (good) writer. Everything is done in the novel to locate it in Québec and very specifically in Montreal. The narrator gives us the precise location of his home “in between the Fontaine de Johannie (a roach-ridden restaurant frequented by small-time hoods) and a minuscule topless bar, at 3670 rue St-Denis, right across from Cherrier” (Laferrière 1987: 7). Throughout the novel, the narrator makes reference to places, notably restaurants, and bars, that can only be associated with Montreal such as Zorba’s Pizza and Brochetterie, Da Giovanni’s, Bistro à JoJo, the club House of the Rising Sun, the Mount Royal Cross, McGill and Sir George Williams Universities (now Concordia University). These are not references to restaurants and bars made by a tourist, but those by a local resident who knows and frequents them. The narrator also makes a number of references that a Québécois (especially if he or she is from Montreal) could easily recognize. One such reference is to the October Crisis of 1970, made by Bouba, the narrator’s roommate. Neither the narrator, nor the author offer any information about the events that took place, and the Québécois reader would not need any, for as John Gray, a Canadian journalist, explains, even 30 years later: […] the memory of that October still evokes a certain pain and a terrible anguish. But October 1970, became instead a time of turmoil unprecedented in the country. Terrorists seized a corner of power and a corner of legitimacy. Soldiers were in the streets and the body of a politician was in the trunk of a car. And a great many Canadians were simply scared. As the years go by, it is harder and harder to explain what happened in October 1970, to those who weren't around. (Gray 2000)

This tragic period saw the Front de liberation du Québec kidnap a British diplomat and the Minister of Labor, after seven years of various acts of terrorism. By reminding the Québécois reader of these events without explanation, Laferrière is demonstrating that his narrator is one of them, unlike the author who did not arrive until 1976 (Laferrière 1987: 154). 1970 is also an important year with regard to one of the main themes of the novel. In 1970, Loyola College and Sir George Williams University

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became Concordia University, what is now one of the two Anglophone universities in Montreal. The other Anglophone university, McGill, is mentioned along with Sir George Williams University in this first novel by Dany Laferrière, to help remind the reader of the ever present issue of language, but also as a reminder of the issues of race in the city. In 1968, two conferences were held on the position of blacks in the society, the first taking place at Sir George Williams University, and the second at McGill. This added to the racial tensions at Sir George Williams, which exploded the following year in the form of a riot by students who were trying to address the racism present in the higher education system (Forsythe 1971: 7-8). By evoking these two schools, where the narrator of Laferrière’s novel often goes to flirt and pick up WASP (White AngloSaxon Protestant) women, the author is establishing an intimate knowledge of Montreal’s history. “Man” (Laferrière 1987: 10), as his roommate Bouba calls him, knows just where to go to pick up young female WASPs. Noticeably, the narrator does not wander much in the city. We find him most often either in his apartment, or at a watering hole. The author describes these places as a theater director would: “Bistro à JoJo. Noon. Warm Temperature” (Laferrière 1987: 80). The protagonist finds himself with women whom he seduces, with more or less success, that he names “Miz” (Literature, Sundae, Snob, etc.) “[s]o as not to get Gloria Steinem on [their] case” (Laferrière 1987: 20). These women, all WASPs, are found in primarily Anglophone neighborhoods. It is through these women and neighborhoods that the narrator, and thus the author, proves that he knows Québec as an insider even though he is regarded as an outsider. The narrator demonstrates his knowledge of local stereotypes as he describes his various conquests: “What danger can a mouse possibly represent for a healthy Westmount girl? [...] “Hey!” “Hey” is for horses! Don’t these Westmount girls have any couth?” [...] “Since when do Outremont girls talk like that?” (Laferrière 1987: 74-75)

Each reference is made without any explanation. The author is carefully creating an atmosphere of shared local stereotypes (or at least a common understanding of these localized attitudes) between the reader and the narrator/author. The reader who is not from Montreal must look to

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guide books like Fodor’s Montreal and Quebec City by Rachel Klein, to better understand what the narrator is trying to communicate: On the Island of Montréal the names “Westmount” and “Outremont” are synonymous with wealth and power. If—as some people say—the neighborhoods are two sides of the same coin, that coin has to be a gold one. […] The two neighborhoods may appear mirror images of each other, but they have one essential difference. […] Westmount remains stubbornly English […] and Outremont is stubbornly French. (Klein 2008: 53)

Not only does he know all of the local stereotypes and where the popular watering holes are, but the narrator also prefers all that is local and is opposed to the ever culturally invading neighbor to the south: A bar. [...] The TV is on a shelf next to an enormous Budweiser bottle. This Bud’s for you. “A Bud.” Advertising works. (Laferrière 1987: 91)

Advertising does work or, in a more literal translation of the original French version of the novel, ‘advertising is “inevitable”’ (Laferrière 1985: 99). It seems inevitable in the novel that North American Anglophone culture, particularly from the United States, pervades and overwhelms francophone Québécois culture. Like a true patriot, the narrator, and author, resists: “I’ve been in isolation for three days with a case of Molson. [...] The room pitches lightly on a sea of Molson” (Laferrière 1987: 138). He drinks Molson beer, “Molson Canadian, Made from Canada,” as the Molson Coors Brewing Company advertises, instead of a “Made in USA” product like Budweiser or “The Great American Lager,” as advertised by Anheiser-Busch InBev N.V. We find along the story that the narrator does prefer all that is Canadian, proving his Québécois identity. When we find the protagonist with Miz Snob, we learn that he prefers Leonard Cohen (a Canadian from Westmount, who famously sang in French Le Partisan, a reminder by Cohen of the francophone origins of Québec) to Bob Dylan (an America from Minnesota): “‘I prefer him to Dylan. His early songs, at least.’ Miz Snob, almost spilled my daiquiri. She likes Cohen, but Dylan is king” (Laferrière 1987: 109). Unlike the WASPs, the narrator shows that he is more of a true Canadian than they. Even the language of the narrator suggests that he is a true native. When he is describing a condom, Laferrière uses the local dialect. In the original French version, we find the following description for a now defunct prophylactic company: “Shields (extra sensitive, contoured for

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better fit, lubrificated)” (Laferrière 1985: 108). Interestingly, in this French version of the novel there is no translation given. What draws the nonCanadian reader’s attention is the word “lubrificated,” a specifically Canadian word. English then, is really the only thing separating the WASPs of the novel from the “penetration” of the black narrator. These condoms are then, by their usage, what limits the phallic weapon of the Negro; much as English limits the usage of French in Québec. We also find particular sayings from the United States such as “I can’t describe it, but I’d know what it is if I heard it,” the narrator says when asked to describe jazz (Laferrière 1987: 10). The author re-appropriates the expression “I know it when I see it,” the famous description of pornography given by Justice Potter Stewart in the U.S Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio (Regulation of Obscenity). This use of the expression gives jazz a sensual, almost obscene element. This added element by the author links jazz with the overall themes of the novel, sex and identity, especially when he says, “[j]azz always makes me think of New Orleans, and that makes a Negro nostalgic” (Laferrière 1987: 9). To balance this abundance of sexual references, Laferrière litters the text with quotes from the Koran, which is curious considering the Christian history of the region. These citations are found in parentheses, which raises the question of who exactly is doing the citing, the narrator or the author? In fact, what is noticeable about the topography of Montreal as described by Laferrière, is the absence of churches or any other religious construction other the Cross of Mount Royal especially as the accurate geography of the novel is used to supplement the link between language and identity. Dany Laferrière explains in his interview with Bernard Magnier, that Islam is not central to the text, but rather a decoration, to offer a sort of balance (Laferrière 2010: 173). The cited suras offer a counterweight to the actual religious history of Montreal, to the WASPs, but also to the notso family friendly themes of the novel. For Laferrière, it is style that is of the upmost importance. In this novel, we see its importance first hand. It does not offer much in way of conventional plot and even many of the characters are deliberately onedimensional. The white women are just (stereo)“types,” as the black men are: “Let me point out that for all intents and purposes there are no women in my novel. There are just types. Black men and white women.” (Laferrière 1987: 145)

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What are consistently present in the novel are the suras, for decoration and jazz, for rhythm. From the first chapter on, along with the narrator, we hear jazz as the text progresses. The narrator first hears for the “fifth time [...] that Charlie Parker record” (Laferrière 2010: 7). There are a number of jazz titles that appear throughout the novel: Cool Blues, Mood Indigo, Take the A Train, and The Pithecanthropus Erectus. Jazz is frequently referenced in the novel and its rhythms are incorporated within the text as Laferrière explains that the novel not only has a certain rhythm, but an “American” beat: I regret not having known English at the moment when I was writing How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, otherwise I would have written it in English. Besides I did write it in English, at least that’s what I said to David Homel, my translator: “Man, it’ll be easy. It’s already written in English, just that the words are in French.” He though that was rubbish. It’s not until he began translating the book that he called me to say that I was right. He immediately recognized the American beat. It’s an American book written, curiously, in French. (my translation) (Laferrière 2010: 173)

This “beat” that Laferrière mentions reminds one of the Beat generation of writers, particularly Jack Kerouac. Kerouac, who famously listened to jazz while writing On the Road and other novels, declared on the first page of Mexico City Blues: 242 choruses: “I want to be considered a jazz poet” (Kerouac 1959: 1). Clearly influenced by the use of an “American beat,” Dany Laferrière does pay homage to Jack Kerouac (an American writer of Québécois parents) by naming one of the bars his narrator frequents “Les Clochards Célestes,” the French translation of The Dharma Burns. Laferrière is clearly influenced by Kerouac and the beat writers, but he also goes a step further. Alvina Ruprecht explains in her L’Amérique c’est moi: Dany Laferrière and the Borderless Text: Through his linguistic choices and ordering of the text, Laferrière rewrites the American road novel in which he appropriates the jazz rhythms characteristic of Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beat poets. […] In this way, parts of Laferrière’s texts become musical scores […] In language terms, portions of the text become accumulations of popular slogans, ironic associations and word games, to create playful circular movement like a jazz riff. (Ruprecht 1995: 261)

Laferrière produces a text that integrates “the discordant screech of the improvising saxophone along with the fine tuned harmony of layer upon layer of literary sources all converging in an angry monologue” (Ruprecht

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1995: 261). Indeed certain parts of the novel seem improvised, like his long list of racist quotes: “Nigger go home, Va-t-en, Nègre. The Black Bottom’s off the Top 20. Hasta la vista, Negro. Last call, colored man” (Laferrière 1987: 13). Or even when the narrator lists the names of the authors found in his bookcase: Hemingway, Miller, Cendrars, Bukowski, Freud, Proust, Cervantès, Borges, Cortázar, Dos Passos, Mishima, Apollinaire, Ducharme, Cohen, Villon, Levy Beaulieu, Fennario, Himes, Baldwin, Wright, Pavese, Aquin, Quevedo, Ousmane, J.-S. Alexis, Roumain, G. Roy, De Quincey, Marquez, Jong Alego Capentier, Atwood, Asturias, Amado, Fuentes, Kerouac, Corso, Handke, Limonov, Yourcenar. (Laferrière 1987: 101-2)

While these lists may seem like the improvised part of a harmonious orchestral ensemble, they are part of an overall narrative strategy. With the first list of citations, the narrator shows that race is not just an American (in the continental sense of the term) theme, but also a global one. The same can be said about the list of authors. With this list, we see authors from around the world who write on a wide range of themes. In these two lists/monologues, Laferrière shows that while issues can be local they are indeed global and can be understood, interpreted and communicated in many languages. What we are presented with then is a novel that is Québécois with an American (continental) beat that has global influences. Laferrière has managed to present the effects of globalism, where the world becomes more connected while the emphasis becomes more and more on the local. By mentioning specific real world places, and by using the local dialect, the story is given credibility. However, the very question of what is local/native is put on trial in the text as well as in the real world. The narrator of Laferrière’s text is seen as foreign despite his carnal knowledge of Montreal, his preference for all that is Québécois, and his Québécois language. He remains an exotic foreigner because he is black: Watching me eat moves her. Miz Literature is incredible. She was brought up to believe everything she’s told. Her cultural heritage; I can tell her the most outlandish stories and she’ll nod her head and stare with those believing eyes. She’ll be moved. I can tell her I consume human flesh, that somewhere in genetic code the desire to eat white flesh is inscribed, that my nights are haunted by her breasts, her hips, her thighs, I swear it, I can tell her all that and more and she’ll understand. She’ll believe me. (Laferrière 1987: 25)

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However, even amongst blacks, the narrator is not amongst his own people. In a scene where the narrator speaks with an Ivorian and a Senegalese man, they call the narrator “brother,” as a black man and because they apparently assume he is also an immigrant (Laferrière 1987: 81). However, they are not speaking the same language. The Senegalese man asks, “How many do you give me?” a question that the protagonist does not understand, unlike the Ivorian, who explains that the Senegalese man is asking “how many winters do you give him,” an unhelpful translation (Laferrière 1987: 82). Language has betrayed the narrator. Others define the narrator’s identity, just as the author’s identity is put into question by his writing. Dany Laferrière’s translator David Homel writes in the prologue of the novel: “When my book came out,” Dany Laferrière recalls with bitterness and amazement, “nobody believed it was written by a black man. They said, whoever wrote it writes almost like a black. Everyone was so sure it was written by a white. A black couldn’t write like that, they said. (Laferrière 1987: 1)

Even other Haitian immigrants to Montreal doubted the author’s true identity. According to an account by Alvina Ruprecht certain Haitians argue that the writer of How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired “does not write like a Haitian: from his novel you can’t even tell he is Haitian” (Rupercht 1995: 254). Based on these quotes we can understand that no one recognized Laferrière as one of their own: they saw him as foreign or someone who had abandoned his homeland. As Alvina Ruprecht puts it: “They imply somehow that Laferrière’s writing is not legitimate because he has not respected his particular origins.” (Rupercht 1995: 254) Laferrière does seem aware of this critique, in that he offers a response through his narrator who responds to an interviewer’s question about how blacks have responded to his novel: “They want to lynch me.” (Laferrière 1987: 148)

Laferrière understands that his writings have forced him to turn in his “black card.” Not only do some blacks see him as having abandoned them, but also they treat him just as white supremacists treat them, flipping the black’s position of power in the race relationship against the narrator/author. Laferrière’s narrator’s response is fairly direct to his black audience as well as to all of his audiences. An interviewer asks: “Doesn’t it bother you?” The narrator answers, “To be a traitor is every writer’s

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destiny” (Laferrière 1987: 149). In other words, the writer’s job is to write, not to be loyal to any group or abstract ideal. By writing a novel in Québec, about Québec, in Québécois, for Québécois readers, but with an American rhythm and citations drawn from world literature, Laferrière has reinforced his narrator’s declaration that the “NÉGRITURE” era (as distinct from negritude, the actual literary movement) is over as he writes in the French version of the novel (Laferrière 1985: 17)). Laferrière makes a distinction between atti-“tude” and écri-“ture” (writing), and suggests that these classifications (AfricanAmerica literature, French literature, English literature) and movements where one must be identified based on certain characteristics, such as language, race or nationality, are self-limiting just as the créolité movement claimed negritude was self-limiting. In an ever more globalized world, where identity fluidly crosses categories, current literature must be a world literature. (Good) writers should ultimately be concerned simply with (the) writing, itself.

References Forsythe, Dennis. Let the Niggers Burn: The Sir George Williams Affair and its Caribbean Aftermath. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1971. Print. Gray, John. “Pierre Elliott Trudeau: 1919-2000.” Globeandmail.com. The Globe and Mail. 30 Sep. 2000. Web. 15 Jan. 2011. Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Burns. New York : Viking Press. 1958. Print. —. Mexico City Blues: 242 choruses. 1959. New York : Grove Press, 1990. Print. Klein, Rachel. Fodor’s Montreal & Quebec City. New York : Random House, 2008. Print. Laferrière, Dany. Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer. 1985. Montreal: Typo, 2002. Print. —. How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired. Trans. David Homel. 1987. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010. Print. —. J’écris comme je vis. 2000. Montréal : Boréal, 2010. Print. —. Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? Trans. David Homel. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1993. Print. Munro, Martin. “Master of the New: Tradition and Intertextuality in Dany Laferrière’s Pays sans chapeau.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 18 (September 2005): 176-88. Print. “Regulation of Obscenity.” umkc.edu. Exploring Constitutional Conflicts. n.d. Web. 15 Jan 2011.

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Ruprecht, Alvina. “‘L’Amérique c’est moi’: Dany Laferrière and the Borderless Text.” The Reordering of Culture in the Hood: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada. Ed. Alvina Ruprecht, and Cecilia Taiana. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1995. Print. “The October Crisis: Civil Liberties Suspended.” CBC Digital Archives. CBC Radio-Canada. n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2011.

CHAPTER FIVE “FRANCOPOLYPHONIES”: MUSICAL MOVEMENTS IN THE FRENCHLANGUAGE TEXT ALISON RICE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Contemporary francophone women writers from around the world are creating unique forms of French in their work. They are incorporating into their writing unusual turns of phrase and idiosyncratic syntax, and allowing their own voices to inflect the text with innovative rhythms and articulations. Whether French was part of her colonial or postcolonial heritage, or a tongue she made a conscious choice to study in her homeland or after her arrival in France, each of these women has found a way to embrace her individual forms of expression and celebrate the use of “foreign accents” in her writing. Three women whose writing exemplifies the capacity of music to communicate in specific ways in the literary work are Nathacha Appanah, Maryse Condé, and Fatou Diome, and if we place their literary creations in dialogue, so to speak, some rich revelations about current francophone literary work come out. Recent novels are uniquely French but not only French, conscious of the French language in which they are written, but informed by other places and other intonations, indeed by other forms of music, tradition, and musical traditions, that contribute to refreshingly new literary compositions. Women writers who have come to France from elsewhere, and who have taken up residence in the hexagonal space after spending important formative moments outside it, infuse their French-language texts with other languages. This is an inevitable development in the world today, as Édouard Glissant attests: “Today, even when a writer doesn’t know any other language, he takes into account, whether he is aware of it or not, the existence of these languages that surround him in his writing process. You cannot write a language in a monolingual fashion. You are obligated to

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take into account the imaginaries of languages.1 Mauritian-born writer Nathacha Appanah makes an assertion that resonates with Glissant’s comments in her 2005 novel La noce d’Anna. The voice of Sonia, a woman writer from Mauritius who lives in France and writes in French, indicates that her literary influences come from a different linguistic tradition than the one in which this character participates: “Shakespeare, Woolf, Dickens, Brontë. Only English writers, while I wrote in French. This didn’t bother me, on the contrary. Neither one was my mother tongue; neither was in competition with the other. I have always written in French, my imaginary is in that language, it isn’t a question of choice.”2 If her imaginary is found in French, this imaginary is not free from the influence of the other tongue that is not her mother tongue, English. In fact, this language is found throughout the French-language text and carries great significance, as the following passage reveals: “I tell her: ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.’ When I speak to her in English, she knows that it is important. It’s a pact that we have never formulated, one of these things that you know when you live with a person for a long time.”3 When the narrative voice can’t find the right expression in the French tongue she knows thoroughly, simply because the expression does not exist in this language, she has recourse to the other imperial language with a history in her native country, as in this example: “in English there is a perfect expression for this: small talk.”4 If there is anything the character named Sonia does not appreciate, it is what might be characterized as “small talk,” linguistic exchanges that only touch on the surface, conversations that seem artificial, insincere, and that fail to communicate anything of real significance. She is especially aware of the connotations of words and phrases, and the meaning that oftrepeated expressions ultimately fail to convey, in her analysis: “Here it is: the beginning of ready-made sentences, of sentences unmade.”5 Even at her daughter’s wedding—or perhaps especially at her daughter’s wedding—she is attuned to the rehearsed nature of the pronouncements that are made: “The priest says the necessary words, words from movies, staged words.”6 She grew up in a family that didn’t engage in the repetition of commonly uttered phrases, and has inherited a similar difficulty in expressing her affection toward her own daughter: “I have not been one of these parents who say words of love to their children, maybe because mine never said them to me, maybe because I thought that those words were said too much and because of this they didn’t mean anything anymore.”7 This desire to avoid diminishing the potential impact of language is understandable, especially given Sonia’s vocation as a writer,

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a profession that arguably is supposed to restore to human experience the deeper meaning that the appropriate choice of words can impart. The narrative voice addresses the act of writing repeatedly in this text, reflecting on the choice of certain terms and the various connotations they carry, and evoking the difficulty of writing well. Sometimes the act of putting words to paper is especially challenging, just as articulating thoughts after any moving experience can be: We don’t say anything. Our silence resembles those following a film showing, when the movie is good, when the emotions linger, when the images still dance in your head and nobody wants to say, “So, what do you think?” because at that moment, at the moment when the phrase is uttered, the film would be in the past, because we must assign words to feelings.8

Assigning words to feelings is a task Nathacha Appanah accomplishes in her novel with the assistance of a number of musical references that punctuate the text at various moments. The wedding party benefits from a whole array of songs—all of which are written in English—that cast a certain hue on the events of this momentous day: “The musicians moved out onto the terrace and played songs from before in order to put a little sepia in this religious ceremony. You Are my Sweet Valentine; You Look Wonderful Tonight; Strangers in the Night; Like a Bridge over Troubled Water; Smoke Gets in Your Eyes…”9 It is true that the very titles of these well-known ballads create a mood not only on the dance floor, but also in the minds of readers who know these tunes well. These famous refrains start to play within us as soon as we see such renowned phrases printed in italics, adding a soundtrack to the literary text that contributes additional layers of possible meaning, and demonstrates an awareness of the multilingual atmospheres that make up our contemporary world. Certain songs permeate La noce d’Anna, returning at various moments in the text: “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” is mentioned no fewer than three times, providing a repetitive musical ambiance that mirrors the returning nature of refrains within a single song (77; 115-16; 138). What is especially interesting with respect to this song is that the pronoun “of” is consistently rendered as “on” in each citation of this title, and this slight mistake succeeds in somehow making this song seem a little more foreign, at least to the English-language critic, and displaced from its original context, reading as if in “translation” in the French-language text. Another significant musical reference in this text is “My Way” (44), a song made famous by Frank Sinatra’s performance of it in English, but that was originally written and performed in French by Claude François. It is not the French version of this composition that serves as a reference for the

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francophone author, but rather the English translation of it, the message of which differs tremendously from the original. When I spoke with Nathacha Appanah in June 2006, she affirmed that she could have titled this book “My Way,” because she found herself listening to the song over and over again while she was writing it. In her estimation, the message of this composition was pertinent to La noce d’Anna: “I have reached a certain stage and I don’t regret a thing.”10 While the latter sentiment is certainly explored in a celebrated song by the French singer Édith Piaf, it is the English-language version that dominates in Appanah’s mind, and it is this title that appears in her text. This does not mean that her novel is devoid of references to songs in French, but such references are more subtly integrated into the narrative, as in the following example: “So, this evening, because I will only know of this man what he wants to tell me and show me today, because I know that between us, there isn’t even a possible story, just this chance in the merry-go-round of life, because I know all that, I tell myself that I must be, as never before, awake.”11 Alors, ce soir, parce que de cet homme je ne saurai que ce qu’il voudra bien me dire et me montrer aujourd’hui, parce que je sais qu’entre nous, ce n’est même pas une histoire possible, juste un hasard dans le tourbillon de la vie, parce que je sais tout ça, je me dis qu’il faut que je sois, comme jamais, éveillée” (140). In this passage, the title of the song Jeanne Moreau performs in François Truffaut’s film, Jules et Jim, is not set apart from the rest of the text in italics, the way all of the English-language songs are. It is simply included in a seamless manner that appears to point to the way clichés from songs enter into our minds, and permeate our thoughts, regardless of how vigilant we are. The lyrics from this renowned melody are a part of this text, even if they are not included, for the very mention of “le tourbillon de la vie” points toward the inevitable, imminent end of the budding relationship between Sonia and a man whose name just happens to be “Roman.” In Maryse Condé’s 2005 novel, Histoire de la femme cannibale, music emerges in innovative ways as well. Often titles of well-known songs in English are provided in a manner similar to that of Appanah’s text; the insertions of phrases that make up the titles of well known pieces of music seem to provide additional emphasis at important moments in the novel, as in the following example: “At the same time, illogically, the loss of her gift was destroying her. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” (140).12

This Negro spiritual was composed in the 19th century, and it immediately recalls the period of slavery in the United States. For many

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readers, even those who are not native English speakers, this song is so familiar that it is very difficult to peruse these words without hearing—if only in one’s head—the notes that accompany them. Another example of a musical reference providing a strong punctuation mark in Condé’s text can be found in another American reference: “In Times Square, above the idling crowds, the neon signs raped the darkness. I am in a New York state of mind” (95).13

Just as the title of Otis Redding’s song is slightly altered in Appanah’s text, so these two melodic lines have been modified in Condé’s text, and these changes allow a foreign accent to come through, as the rhythm and emphases of the English originals have been altered in the French original: the word “Sometimes” from the spiritual is followed by a comma in Condé’s work, and “I’m” is separated into “I am,” while the word “state” is capitalized to indicate a shift of interest to the location rather than the mood in Billy Joel’s song. The mood of the text is, however, influenced in undeniable ways through the inclusion of these titles. Elsewhere in the novel, portions of lyrics are provided for well-known musical pieces in French. Lines of music, always placed in italics, are found in passages such as the following: “Rose sang to her the barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann: Belle nuit, succède au jour, À nos douleurs, fais trêve”;14 “The city was in a festive mood and Nature was singing like Charles Trenet: Y a de la joie! Partout, y a de la joie!”15

The soundtrack of this text is not limited to English and French, as a passage regarding the final concert of the principal protagonist Rosélie’s mother reveals: “Breaking with habit, she had sung in Spanish: Bésame, bésame mucho, Como si fuera esta noche La última vez.”16

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Maryse Condé does not limit her musical references to existing pieces of music, however, and takes advantage of the opportunity to invent her own song—through the creative presence of the central character—in this work of fiction: “Another time Rosélie had discovered Salama Salama’s gold record, The Reggae of the Wretched, that had sold over a million copies and whose music had no trouble feeding him comfortably. She had helped him compose the lyrics. Dance, the wretched of the earth, Dance, the prisoners of hunger, Yes, dance, dance, dance to forget! Me rasta man, I urge you to love one another. If everyone loved each other Loved each other in the morning, loved each other in the evening, Loved each other at noon, loved each other at midnight, The world would be a better place.”17

Found in the midst of a text containing lyrics to real songs, notorious tunes that exist outside the novel, these lyrics take on special meaning. These words are not only significant in their intertextual nod to the publication of theorist Frantz Fanon, but also in their upbeat message, even if we can also view this optimism as naïve, and the simple encouragement to dance and love as an incomplete exhortation, if true change is desired in the world. What is particularly striking about Histoire de la femme cannibale is the vertiginous variety of musical citations it contains. It is through music that the worldwide “métissage” proclaimed by one protagonist is realized in the literary creation: “The greatest thinkers of our time are saying that the world is in a state of hybridization [métissage].”18 The music of this multilingual text often includes phrases from Guadeloupean creole, the mother tongue of so many from the particular French overseas department where both the character Rosélie and the author Maryse Condé were born. While often these creole phrases are left unexplained in the work, occasionally they are accompanied by some explanation, as in the following: “Kod yanm ka mawé yanm. Friendship binds those who are far from their shores.”19 The characters depicted in Condé’s novel are often represented by the musical genres they appreciate, and the relationships that form between these individuals occasionally stand out in contrast to their differences in musical taste. This is the case for Rosélie and Stephen, an Englishman whom she loves and shares her life with for many years: “Stephen’s taste

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in music was totally opposite to hers, strictly jazz and Verdi operas, which she hated.”20 The fact that their preferences are not in tune with each other does not preclude the possibility for a fulfilling love relationship, at least not on the surface. And this apparent harmony is celebrated in the depiction of a place of business in which every sort of musical recording can be found: “the most delightful shop imaginable, called the Threepenny Opera. Everything was shelved together in total disorder: Christmas carols with requiems, motets with oratories, cello suites with raï music, and Cesaria Evora with Cheb Mami.”21 This positive portrayal of the capacity for a store—and by extension, humanity—to embrace diversity in sound and style holds hope not only for music, but also for literature, particularly as the two combine and intertwine in new compositions by francophone authors. Fatou Diome, a woman writer from Senegal, inserts music in innovative ways into her 2008 novel, Inassouvies, nos vies. The principal protagonist, Betty, listens to a variety of musical offerings, and the book attests to these different influences in an unprecedented manner. The page preceding the dedication of this novel is devoted to the “ambiance musicale” of the book and two pieces of music performed by musicians from Senegal and Mali on the West African instrument known as the kora are listed along with Keith Jarrett’s jazz improvisations on the piano in a famous concert in the German city of Köln. Providing readers with this listing effectively sets the tone for the reflections that follow, in a rich text set in France that provides a powerfully philosophical analysis of this society and the individuals who inhabit it. In Diome’s novel, Betty befriends an elderly woman she calls Félicité, and the latter proves to be very wise in many respects, providing insights into the French language such as the following: “French is a very elegant language, my dear, but we would do well to occasionally distrust her overly attractive finery.”22 This observation is inspired by Félicité’s personal experience as a war widow who made the mistake of viewing her husband’s dead body because she was unaware of the unforgettable state it was in: “All the same, soldiers should be taught to be frank! Instead of saying, Ma’am, your husband was touched; they should have said the correct words: Ma’am, your husband was squashed. A little effort toward exactitude would have spared many widows the sight of a veritable slaughter.”23 Félicité’s comments provide Betty, a foreigner in France and a non-native speaker of French, with the opportunity to reflect on the ways this language works: “French is a sparkling blade and, like all blades, it is where it is the finest that it cuts. In this language, je vous en prie can signify come in or get the

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hell out. In the end, it is only the intention that holds weight, if you manage to unmask the harlequin behind his costume of words. Félicité was right, Betty says to herself, this language knows how to dress up the truth. It is like a residential neighborhood from the Third World; the flashy inscription always hides the bottomless misery of the shantytowns crouching in the shade of the high-rise buildings.”24

As an outsider who speaks French but doesn’t have the intuitive relationship to this tongue that a native Frenchwoman does, Betty is well positioned to critique the ambiguities that the language often contains. In like manner, even though her preferred language of writing is French, the narrator in Nathacha Appanah’s novel underscores that this tongue is decidedly foreign to her in certain respects, such as the wordplay that she observes but in which she cannot participate: “I don’t like plays on words. They are so “French”[franchouillard], they are like a game of recognition for them. They alienate all of those who are not French, who cannot even find help in a dictionary. Who apart from the French can understand or even laugh at ‘Comment vas-tuyau de poêle?’”25 This example seems particularly far-fetched, but perhaps it best illustrates the point that such plays on words truly remain outside the comprehension of foreign-born individuals, even when they are fluent in French, because the joke reveals a sense of humor that is unique to the French mindset, impenetrable for those who were not raised within it. Just as Sonia is critical toward language that is not deeply communicative in La noce d’Anna, so Betty judges many preordained exchanges in French to be ineffective: We often pretend to have all of our hungers satisfied. How’s it going? It’s going well. Of course, like the honeyed credits of a film—too good to be true—these two phrases have succeeded in rendering human contact impermeable. In summer as in winter, we walk around in waterproof coats. Obviously, we all have a foot in the ocean. It’s going well!26

While the fixed expression “ça va” is found on lips everywhere, there is a specific form of language that many adopt in particular places, and Betty fights against this impersonal communication on Félicité’s behalf: “In retirement homes, like in hospitals, we sometimes meet strange computers on feet, programmed to drone a discourse as impersonal as it is infantilizing.”27 It may come as little surprise that, like Sonia, the protagonist named Betty is a writer, and her task is to put to paper the right words, and the right translations.

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Betty proclaims early on in the text that elderly people are treated differently where she is from: “Adults are important, the elderly respectable! This idea came to her from Africa, and she sought books contingent on this creed.”28 She searches in the French literary tradition for a text that is faithful to this idea, but comes up short: “Betty didn’t know how to adapt to her beautiful African maxim. So she turned in into a joke and threw it in shreds at the trashcan of words, those too pretty to communicate operational ideas and that worked only in favor of rhetorical mirth.”29 Her understanding of the indispensable necessity of the elderly to the young is something that can only be called for in musical terms, softly: “Tell the older ones to give us the notes of their murmur to provide rhythm for the music of our youth.”30 Far from her own grandmother, whom Diome quotes in this text just as she cites philosophers like Adorno, Betty must keep up appearances, in accordance with societal expectations and her public persona. The literary work reveals this truth through a balanced rhythm that sings of global themes: Some are at times more solid than you, but because you handle your pains in silence, in order to avoid bothering others, they attribute to you a Buddhist serenity and ask you to share the weight of their cross. And here you are wavering, but still promoted to tutor. You’re not Hercules, but you aren’t bad as a mule. It would be good if everyone understood that, despite its size, the wood of the baobab tree is among the most fragile.31

Betty is in tune with her inner self, but doesn’t know how to communicate her weaknesses to the society around her, which she is constantly and carefully observing. She is aware that others often view her in stereotypical terms, but a special relationship she develops with a man goes beyond verbal expression, providing a model for human interaction that is reminiscent of the one found in Appanah’s novel: Through the looks they gave each other, while adjusting their glasses, Betty understood that their eyes communicated more than words. By remaining attentive, you can read all emotional states between the forehead and the chin, deciphering the world in the blink of an eye. Words only complete the facial expression; what is essential is in the difference between a smile and a smirk.32

To express what takes place between these two individuals, the style shifts, becoming more exclamatory, fragmentary, and joyful: “Opera! Don’t sing anything other anymore, outside the beauty of the human. Only human warmth makes you want to sing. The vibrato of life, shimmering

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with this fire that burns within us.”33 In her spoken reflections on immigration in France, Julia Kristeva has recourse to a musical metaphor: Not only are we divided and we harbor within “ourselves” the foreignness that is often unbearable, but this polyphony brings us pleasure! This is what puts into question facile moral stances and compact ensembles. It is not surprizing, as a consequence, that many people shy away from twentieth-century culture and don’t wish to open their eyes to the troubling truths that it reveals. It is, however, the recognition of this foreignness intrinsic to us that we have a greater chance of tolerating the foreignness of others. And of attempting to create communities that are less monolithic and more polyphonic.34

When a musical breakthrough occurs in Fatou Diome’s novel, when the character Betty allows music to come through in her life, a true connection is made between this central character and another individual, and the foreigner’s status is forever changed: “With you, I am no longer a foreigner here, since you welcome me in your big heart. You have become part of my family.”35 At the close of Inassouvies, nos vies, the principal protagonist takes off, and a caretaker who had gotten to know her through her visits to Félicité at the retirement home seeks to understand the mystery of Betty’s departure by looking around her apartment. She turns on the stereo and listens to the CD that Betty had left behind: “She was seeking something to calm her in this music, which was totally unknown to her, but the cords of the kora vibrated to the very depths of her being.”36 The fact that she experiences such an immediate connection to a genre of music to which she has never been exposed before testifies to the power of music to transcend borders and “speak” to us even if we lack the expertise to decipher this artistic form. In a chapter titled “World Music, World Literature: A Geopolitical View,” Katie Trumpener examines the discipline of ethnomusicology and highlights the ways that “practical musicological work, even more than practical literary work, has modeled, developed, and mainstreamed new paradigms of cross-cultural influence, as a proliferation of intriguing concerts and recordings have reshaped our collective sense of musical tradition” (187). She claims that “Together, musicians and ethnomusicologists have changed and expanded the West’s musical maps” (189) and asks this provocative question: “Could world literature, as a critical and cosmopolitan paradigm, someday achieve the same cross-over success (and generate as much local interest and wide-ranging curiosity) as world music?” (190).

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In Maryse Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale, the store called the Threepenny Opera contains a variety of clients, with particular musical affinities: “Some white customers were rummaging through the opera shelves, some blacks through world music.”37 This passage indicates that what has become known under the category of “world music” may not be quite as globally attractive as we might hope, and hints that more astute understandings of musical traditions from elsewhere might be necessary for a truly profound interpretation and appreciation of these texts to emerge. But this literary text also points to the fact that, just as the caretaker who enters Betty’s abandoned apartment is touched by the sample of “world music” she discovers there, so others, like Rosélie, find that music in other tongues wields a profound effect on them: “Yes, there’s something appealing about those songs whose words we cannot understand, something that speaks to us deep down. We can give them wings, embroider them with flowers and stars, and color them however we want. I’ve always preferred sitting down to listen to music. I’ve never known how to dance.”38 This passage, which harks back to the earlier lyrics that Rosélie wrote for her friend the musician, indicates that it is not only important to dance, to move to the music that moves us, but that it is also important to sit down, and to take seriously these tunes that carry messages, cultures, histories, and traditions, especially in the present moment. Trumpener’s question is a crucial one, and the contemporary literary texts of women writers from around the world are demonstrating that it can be answered positively, thanks in large part to the presence of “world music” within the polyphonic text that is “world literature” in French today.

Notes 1

“Aujourd’hui, même quand un écrivain ne connaît aucune autre langue, il tient compte, qu’il le sache ou non, de l’existence de ces langues autour de lui dans son processus d’écriture. On ne peut plus écrire une langue de manière monolingue. On est obligé de tenir compte des imaginaires des langues” (Gauvin 1992: 12). 2 “Shakespeare, Woolf, Dickens, Brontë. Que des Anglais, alors que j’écrivais en français. Cela ne me gênait pas, au contraire. Ni l’une ni l’autre n’était ma langue maternelle, ni l’une ni l’autre ne se faisaient concurrence, j’avais toujours écrit en français, mon imaginaire est dans cette langue-là, ce n’est pas une question de choix” (Appanah 2005: 41-42). 3 “Je lui dis : ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.’ Quand je lui parle en anglais, elle sait que c’est important, c’est un pacte jamais formulé, une de ces choses que l’on sait quand on vit avec une personne pendant longtemps” (Appanah 2005: 51).

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“en anglais il existe une expression parfaite pour cela, du small talk” (Appanah 2005: 116). 5 “Voilà, c’est le début des phrases toutes faites, des phrases pas faites” (Appanah 2005: 86). 6 “Le prêtre dit les mots qu’il faut, les mots des films, les mots mis en scène” (Appanah 2005: 95). 7 “Je n’ai pas été de ces parents qui disent à leurs enfants des mots d’amour, peutêtre parce que les miens ne me les disaient pas, peut-être parce que je croyais que ces mots-là se disent trop et qu’ils ne veulent plus rien dire à force d’être dits” (Appanah 2005:122). 8 “Nous ne disons rien, notre silence ressemble à ceux d’après une séance de cinéma, quand le film est bon, quand les émotions perdurent, quand les images dansent encore dans la tête et que personne ne veut dire ‘Alors, qu’est-ce que t’en penses ?’, parce qu’à ce moment, au moment où cette phrase serait dite, le film serait alors du passé puisqu’il faut déjà mettre les mots sur les émotions. (Appanah 2005: 136-37) 9 “Les musiciens se sont déplacés sur la terrasse et jouent des chansons d’avant pour mettre un peu de sépia dans cette cérémonie religieuse. You Are my Sweet Valentine ; You Look Wonderful Tonight ; Strangers in the Night ; Like a Bridge over Troubled Water ; Smoke Gets in Your Eyes…” (Appanah 2005: 115-116). 10 “Je suis arrivée à une étape et je ne regrette rien.” (Rice. Unpublished interview.) 11 “Alors, ce soir, parce que de cet homme je ne saurai que ce qu’il voudra bien me dire et me montrer aujourd’hui, parce que je sais qu’entre nous, ce n’est même pas une histoire possible, juste un hasard dans le tourbillon de la vie, parce que je sais tout ça, je me dis qu’il faut que je sois, comme jamais, éveillée” (Appanah 2005: 140). 12 “En même temps, illogique, la perte de son don l’anéantissait. Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child” (Condé 2003: 140). English translation (Philcox 2007: 118). 13 “À Times Square, au-dessus de la foule des badauds, les affiches au néon violaient la noirceur. I am in a New York State of mind” (Condé 2005: 95). English translation (Philcox 2007: 76). 14 “Rose lui chantait la barcarolle des Contes d’Hoffmann : Belle nuit, succède au jour, À nos douleurs, fais trêve” (Condé 2005: 197). English translation (Philcox 2007: 170). 15 “Elle s’aperçut qu’à travers la ville en fête de printemps la nature chantait comme Charles Trenet. Y a de la joie ! Partout, y a de la joie !” (Condé 2005: 199). English translation (Philcox 2007: 172). 16 “Rompant avec ses habitudes, elle avait chanté en espagnol : Bésame, bésame mucho, Como si fuera esta noche La última vez”

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(Condé 2005: 86). English translation (Philcox 2007: 68). “Un autre jour, Rosélie s’était trouvée nez à nez avec le disque d’or de Salama Salama que, lui, la musique nourrissait confortablement, vendu à plus d’un million d’exemplaires. Le reggae des damnés. Elle l’avait aidé à en composer les paroles. Dansez, les damnés de la Terre, Dansez, les forçats de la faim, Oui, dansez, dansez pour oublier ! Moi qui suis rasta, je vous exhorte, Aimez-vous ! Si tous les hommes s’aimaient, S’aimaient le matin s’aimaient le soir, S’aimaient à midi et s’aimaient à minuit, Il ferait meilleur vivre en ce monde” (Condé 2005: 130-31). English translation (Philcox 2007: 110). 18 “Les esprits les plus éclairés le clament, le monde est en voie de métissage” (Condé 2005: 77). English translation (Philcox 2007: 60). 19 “Kod yanm ka mawé yanm. L’amitié amarre ceux qui sont loin de leurs rivages” (Condé 2005: 65). English translation (Philcox 2007: 50). 20 “Stephen et elle avaient des goûts opposés, lui n’écoutant que du jazz et des opéras de Verdi qu’elle détestait pareillement” (Condé 2005: 129). English translation (Philcox 2007: 108). 21 “le plus délicieux magasin qu’on puisse imaginer : le Three Penny Opera. Tout voisinait avec tout dans le plus grand désordre : les chants de Noël avec les requiem, les motets avec les oratorios, les suites pour violoncelle avec les airs de raï, Cesaria Evora avec Cheb Mami” (Condé 2005: 129-130). English translation (Philcox 2007: 109). 22 “Le français est une langue bien élégante, ma petite, mais on ferait mieux, parfois, de se méfier de sa trop belle parure” (Diome 2008: 43). 23 “Tout de même, on devrait enseigner la franchise aux soldats ! Au lieu de dire : Madame, votre mari a été touché, ils auraient prononcé les mots justes : Madame, votre mari a été écrabouillé. Un petit effort d’exactitude aurait épargné à bien des veuves la vue d’une véritable boucherie” (Diome 2008: 44). 24 “le français est une lame étincelante et, comme toute lame, c’est là où elle se fait fine qu’elle tranche. Dans cette langue, je vous en prie peut signifier entrez ou foutez le camp. Finalement, seule l’intention fait le tribun, si l’on parvient à démasquer l’arlequin derrière son costume de mots. Félicité avait raison, se dit Betty, cette langue sait maquiller la vérité, c’est comme un quartier résidentiel du Tiers-Monde, la mise en exergue du clinquant cache toujours l’insondable misère des bidonvilles tapis à l’ombre des buildings” (Diome 2008: 43). 25 “Je n’aime pas cela, les jeux de mots, c’est tellement franchouillard, comme une reconnaissance entre eux, aliénant tous ceux qui ne seraient pas français et même un dictionnaire ne pourrait les aider. Qui d’autre que les Français comprennent et peuvent rire de ‘Comment vas-tuyau de poêle ?’” (Appanah 2005: 97). 26 “On fait souvent semblant d’être rassasié de toutes ses faims. Ça va ? Oui, ça va. Bien sûr, comme le générique mielleux d’un film, trop beau pour être vrai, ces deux phrases ont fini par rendre les contacts humains imperméables. Été comme 17

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hiver, on se promène en ciré. Évidemment, on a tous pied dans l’océan. Tout va bien !” (Diome 2008: 203-04). 27 “Dans les maisons de retraite, comme dans les hôpitaux, on rencontre, parfois, d’étranges ordinateurs sur pattes, programmés pour ânonner un discours aussi impersonnel qu’infantalisant” (Diome 2008: 46). 28 “Les adultes sont sérieux, les vieux respectables ! Cette idée lui venait d’Afrique, elle chercha des livres en fonction de ce credo” (Diome 2008: 34-35). 29 “Betty ne savait pas comment s’accommoder de sa très belle maxime africaine. Alors, elle la tourna en dérision, la jeta, par lambeaux, à la poubelle des mots, ceux trop jolis pour véhiculer les idées opérationnelles et qui ne servent qu’à la joyeuseté de la rhétorique” (Diome 2008: 35). 30 “Dites aux aînés de nous offrir les notes de leur murmure pour rythmer la musique de notre jeunesse” (Diome 2008: 108). 31 “Certains sont parfois plus solides que vous, mais parce que vous gérez vos peines en silence, afin de ne pas déranger autrui, ils vous attribuent une sérénité bouddhique et vous demandent de partager le poids de leur croix. Et vous voilà chancelant, mais promu tuteur. Hercule, ce n’est pas vous, mais en mulet vous n’êtes pas mal. Ce serait bien que chacun comprenne que, malgré son envergure, le baobab est des bois les plus fragiles.” (Diome 2008: 79) 32 “De par les regards qu’ils se jetaient, en ajustant leurs lunettes, Betty comprit que leurs yeux communiquaient mieux que les mots. En restant attentif, on peut lire tous les états d’âme entre le front et le menton, décrypter le monde dans un battement de cils. Les mots ne font que compléter l’expression du visage, l’essentiel tient dans un sourire ou un rictus.” (Diome 2008: 127) 33 “Opéra ! Ne chantez plus rien d’autre, en dehors de la beauté de l’humain. Seule la chaleur humaine donne envie de chanter. Vibrato de la vie, frémissement de ce feu qui brûle en nous” (Diome 2008: 241). 34 “Non seulement nous sommes divisés et nous abritons en ‘nous-mêmes’ des étrangetés souvent insoutenables, mais cette polyphonie nous fait jouir ! Voilà de quoi mettre à mal la morale facile, les ensembles compacts. Il n’est pas étonnant, par conséquent, que beaucoup de gens se dérobent à la culture du XXe siècle, ne veulent pas ouvrir les yeux sur les vérités, en effet troublantes, que celles-ci dévoilent. Pourtant, en reconnaissant cette étrangeté intrinsèque à chacun de nous, nous avons plus de chances de tolérer les étrangetés des autres. Et d’essayer de créer, dès lors, des communautés moins monolithiques, plus polyphoniques” (Kristeva 1998: 77). 35 “Avec toi, je ne suis plus une étrangère ici, puisque tu m’accueilles dans ton grand cœur. Tu es devenu un des miens” (Diome 2008: 244). 36 “Elle cherchait l’apaisement dans cette musique, qui lui était totalement inconnue, mais les cordes de la kora vibraient au plus profond d’elle-même” (Diome 2008: 265). 37 “Des clients blancs fourrageaient dans le rayon Opéra. Des Noirs dans le rayon World Music” (Condé 2005: 303). English translation (Philcox 2007: 266-67). 38 “Oui ! Elles nous prennent au plus profond du cœur, ces chansons dont nous ne comprenons pas les paroles ! Nous pouvons leur donner des ailes, les coudre de fleurs et d’étoiles, les broder à notre fantaisie. J’ai toujours préféré m’asseoir à

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écouter la musique. Je n’ai jamais su danser” (Condé 2005: 298). English translation (Philcox 2007: 262).

References Appanah, Nathacha. La noce d’Anna. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. Condé, Maryse. Histoire de la femme cannibale. Paris: Mercure de France, 2005. Translated by Richard Philcox as The Story of the Cannibal Woman. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2007. Diome, Fatou. Inassouvies, nos vies. Paris: Flammarion, 2008. Gauvin, Lise. “L’imaginaire des langues: entretien avec Édouard Glissant.” Études françaises, vol. 28, n. 2-3 (1992): 11-22. Kristeva, Julia. Contre la dépression nationale. Paris: Textuel, 1998. Trumpener, Katie. “World Music, World Literature: A Geopolitical View.” In Haun Saussy, ed., Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006): 185-202.

CHAPTER SIX ‘L’ABOUTISSEMENT DE DEUX ÊTRES’: REPRESENTATIONS OF MARSEILLE/COMORES IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH HIP-HOP CHONG J. BRETILLON BARUCH COLLEGE, THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

As Peter Hawkins states in The Other Hybrid Archipelago (ix), there is a gap in coverage for the literatures and cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean. In addressing the representation of the Comorian community of Marseille in popular music, this essay attempts to expand the definition of Francophonie by creating a new space for imagining current French identity and subjectivity. In a France increasingly shaped by transmigration and cultural hybridity, its second-largest city, Marseille, is often considered an emblematic site of cosmopolitanism and a positive model for immigrant integration. In the last fifteen years, several popular hip-hop artists of Comorian descent have emerged from Marseille’s diverse neighborhoods and have risen to fame. This essay focuses on Marseille’s most commercially successful Comorian rapper, Soprano, whose texts affirm strong attachments to a localized Marseille identity as well as to the country of his family’s origin. After a brief discussion of Comorian immigration and settlement in Marseille, I situate Marseille hip-hop in a broader national and global context in order to demonstrate how Soprano builds on a localized identity that has been popularized by previous rappers. Next, I engage in close readings of Soprano’s music and music videos that reveal the many social contexts in which the rapper constructs his artistic identity. I argue that Soprano’s self-styling as l’aboutissement de deux êtres (the outcome of two beings), both Comorian and Marseillais, deliberately avoids the “problem” of Frenchness, and suggests that the identification with the multicultural, cosmopolitan city of Marseille offers an alternative to rigid constructions of French identity as defined by dominant political and

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social discourses. It is not the goal of this essay to evaluate Soprano’s faithfulness at exemplifying what Comorian identity “is,” rather, I will show how the representation of Comorian identity in contemporary hiphop is informed by the globalizing contexts of Marseille’s cosmopolitanism. Perhaps no public figure has made Comorian identity more visible in contemporary French popular culture than the hip-hop artist and producer known as Soprano, born Saïd M’Roubaba on 14 January 1979 in Marseille. Known for his rapid-fire, staccato flow and thoughtful, melancholic verses, Soprano engages contemporary political concerns in his lyrics such as youth unemployment, poverty, war, and the current global financial crises, while also broaching issues pertaining to young Comorians, such as Comorian weddings and generational conflict. He also broaches deeply personal subjects in songs that earnestly describe his struggles as a father, son, and emerging rapper.1 Soprano appeals to a broad spectrum of listeners, such that this rappeur engagé has emerged as one of France’s most popular artists in recent years, his fame extending well beyond the Hexagon. M’Roubaba earned his nickname as a young boy when he sang religious songs and the Muslim call to prayer in madrassas (a type of religious educational institution) in his neighborhood of Plan d’Aou (the 15th arrondissement of Marseille) using his distinctively high-pitched voice, for which his friends jokingly referred to him as “Soprano.” He began rapping as the MC of Psy 4 de la Rime (“Psychiatrists of Rhyme,” formerly known as the group Kid Dog Black), a group that he formed in 1995 with three childhood friends.2 Under the tutelage of the Marseille-based rappers and producers from the group IAM, Psy 4 de la Rime released three successful albums, Block Party (2002), Enfants de la lune (2005), and Les Cités d’or (2008), which spent a total of thirty-five weeks on the French popular music charts. Soprano broke out as a solo artist in 2007, and has since released three solo albums, including Puisqu’il faut vivre (2007), which sold over two hundred thousand copies, La Colombe (2010), which sold thirty thousand copies in its first week, Le Corbeau (2011), and a live album entitled Live au Dome de Marseille (2008). Soprano’s singles, compilations, and collaborations with other artists, such as the Ivorian group Magic System, appear regularly on the European Billboard Top 100 charts. Moreover, Soprano is known for his electrifying live concerts at which he performs during soldout tours across France, Europe, and Africa. Soprano’s media persona is widely extended on the Internet, in video clips and webcasts, interviews, and in public appearances, where the thirty-four-year-old father of three casts himself as deeply indebted to and representative of his country of origin, the Comoros islands.

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Yet, although Soprano seldom references the Comoros Islands directly in his music, his media persona expresses a strong engagement with the diasporic Comorian community of some eighty thousand in Marseille. For example, in January of 2010, together with Comorian rappers Rohff3 and the crew Troisième Oeil4, Soprano performed a fundraising concert called the Concert de Solidarité at Marseille’s Vélodrome in tribute to the victims of the devastating Yemenia Air crash which, on 29 June 2009, which claimed the lives of 152 Comorians, 62 of whom were residents of Marseille (Bonnefoy 2010: 1). Soprano was also one of the headlining acts at Femua 4 (Festival des Musiques Urbaines d’Anoumabo), a festival of pan-African musicians (Soprano represented the Comoros) organized in June of 2011 by the group Magic System, held in the Ivory Coast just weeks after post-election violence wracked the country. A culminating moment in Soprano’s career occurred on 2 September 2011, when, together with Psy 4 de la Rime, he performed a concert at a stadium in Moroni to a crowd of ninety thousand eager spectators, many of whom were bussed into the capital from neighboring villages just for the concert (Iza M’Madi 2011: 1). It was the first trip to the Comoros for two of the group’s rappers, and had all the accoutrements of an official state visit: the group met with patients at state hospital El-Maarouf, Comorian leaders, and promenaded through village streets to the cries of adoring fans. In his public appearances Soprano has worn traditional Comorian dress (a long, white garment known as a kandu, and the distinctive kofia, a handembroidered hat) and the name-brand tracksuits, jeans, and t-shirts that are standard attire for French hip-hop artists and their global counterparts. He was even featured on a single by Cheikh MC, a fellow Comorian rapper and native of Moroni, called “Beramu” (flag/standard in Swahili), a hiphop adaptation of the Comorian national anthem.5 *** France’s second city and largest port is known colloquially as “the first Comorian city” or, even “the fifth Comorian island”6, and has long been a major city of transit and eventual settlement for the Comorian diaspora in France; at over eighty thousand people, the Comorian population of Marseille is greater than the archipelago’s own capital, Moroni.7 A community known for its strong consular presence, tight-knit neighborhood associations, and prominent presence in media culture, it is also characterized by strong ties to the Comorian islands, given the remittances sent home by migrant works as well as second- and third-generation Comorians. Remittances from émigrés make up the largest share of capital

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for the country (Thierry and Axus 2007: 6). The first Comorian migrants to Marseille were navigators and shipmen on foreign merchant ships including those of the Marseille-based Compagnie des messageries maritimes and Compangie des Indies Orientales in the 1940s.8 After World War II, many Comorians joined the French merchant marines and settled in Marseille and other port cities such as Dunkirk, Le Havre, and Nantes. The year 1974 wrought political and social upheaval for the Comoros: a referendum of self-determination was held, in which 95 percent of voters pronounced in favor of independence (Hawkins 2007: 176), thus signifying the end of French colonial rule for the three islands of Mohéli, Grande Comore, and Anjouan. The fourth island Mayotte seceded a year later when the Comoros officially declared independence from France. In 2009, the people of Mayotte voted in favor of changing the island’s status from a French overseas territory to become France’s 101st départment, which was established in 2011. The separatist crisis and the independence vote complicated citizenship for Marseillais of Comorian origin: eighty percent of them today have French nationality (Thierry and Axus 2007: 8), since they were either born in France or chose to become French after the 1975 referendum. In addition, France’s policy of family reunification, regroupement familial, allowed a great number of Comorian women and children, whose husbands and fathers had French nationality, to join their families in Marseille (Vivier 2000: 25). Marseilleborn Comorian writer Salim Hatubou remarked of the community, “[Are they] Comorians from Marseille, or Marseillais from the Comoros?” (Hatubou 1999: 1), evincing the degree to which the people of the Comorian diaspora identify with the city, thus suggesting that it has been a “successful” migration. The geography of Marseille, its organization as quartier-villages (neighborhood villages), and the sheer density of the Comorian population relative to the whole have favored the development of a rich social and cultural cohesiveness. Like so many other new Marseillais, the first Comorian immigrants put down roots in neighborhoods near the city’s Vieux-Port such as Le Panier and Belsunce, where narrow alleyways and the proximity to open spaces such as the Porte d’Aix became important meeting places for Comorians going about their daily business. Today, many of Marseille’s Comorians live in the city’s quartiers nord, the northern districts that sit atop a natural plateau and that are characterized by high-rise apartment blocks with views of the Mediterranean Sea, all within reach of the city-center by a short bus ride. Rappers Psy 4 de la Rime all hail from the neighborhoods of Plan d’Aou, La Savine, and La Solidarité (15th), in typical Marseille fashion, one refers to a neighborhood’s

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historical name rather than to the administrative arrondissement designation. Several important Comorian cultural associations were formed in Marseille, including FECOM (Fédération des Comoriens de Marseille), the Fondation de Comores, and local groups that support culinary, artistic, and social endeavors. Among the estimated of these four hundred organizations are literacy and tutoring groups, women’s groups, and those that raise funds for the economic development of the Comorian archipelago.9 Geraldine Vivier notes that Comorians in France are in general highly engaged in local associations (62) and that most belong to at least one organization. Participating in a Comorian association fulfills an important identification function for Comorians; it helps one, “se sentir comorien” (“to feel Comorian”) (Vivier 2000: 63), not only culturally, but also politically as well, for associations create a united front, while the country is not so united politically. The flourishing of associations des jeunes (groups for young people) related to hip-hop and “street” arts and culture particularly in Marseille, is well noted. In terms of media culture, Comorians have their own radio station in Marseille, known as Radio Comores Marseille, which broadcasts from the 15th arrondissement, and whose programming consists of Comorian traditional music, Muslim prayers, the advertising of Comorian local businesses, wedding songs, and one hour dedicated to rap music. Soprano and Psy 4 de la Rime feature prominently in the programming, dedications, and prayers. The tragic murder of seventeen-year-old Ibrahim Ali, a rapper with the Marseille group B. Vice and student preparing a professional certificate in woodworking, shone a national spotlight on Marseille’s Comorians and effectively unified the community.10 The social and political context in which the murder occurred had been tense: in the early 1990s, the National Front party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen made significant gains in the Provence-Alpes-Côtes-d’Azur region. During the first round of the presidential elections of 1995, Le Pen earned an unprecedented fifteen percent of the total vote in four regions. On the night of 21 February, Ali was walking to a bus stop in his neighborhood of La Savine with a group of a dozen friends—mostly teenagers of African origin—who had just left a rehearsal for their upcoming AIDS benefit concert. The teens were confronted by three National Front party members who were out sticking posters around the housing project. Robert Lagier, a sixty-three-year-old white man and retiree, drew a pistol, fired three times, and shot Ali in the back, while Lagier’s two associates also fired several shots at the group.11 Ali’s murder—which had occurred during Ramadan—galvanized the Comorian community, incited a demonstration in Marseille of some eighty

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thousand protesters on the Canebière, and has since become a symbol of the hatred, intolerance, and racist xenophobia of the National Front. National Front politicians capitalized on the tragedy to highlight France’s immigration “problem.” Le Pen remarked, “At least this unfortunate incident has brought to everyone's attention the presence in Marseille of 50,000 Comorians, and 150,000 in France!”12 Bruno Mégret, regional councilmember and member of European Parliament blamed Ali himself, stating that Lagier acted in self-defense13, and then attributed the incident to “massive and uncontrolled immigration.”14 The xenophobia and racism of these remarks, made in the mid-1990s, were echoed very recently by Claude Guéant, Secretary of the Interior, who stated in September 2011 during a televised press conference for Grand Jury RTL (a popular political talk show): “There is a considerable Comorian immigration in Marseille that is the cause of a lot of violence. I cannot quantify it.”15 Later, Guéant attempted to attenuate his remarks by stating that the real perpetrators of violence and delinquency were “Comorian people, not French people of Comorian origin.”16 Comorian leaders, the Comorian consulate, members of Comorian associations, and rappers Psy 4 de la Rime, among others, were numerous in their steadfast condemnation of Guéant’s remarks, public manifestations of which included a protest that was held in front of Marseille’s city hall and attended by Comorian writer Salim Hatubou. Comorian responses to the remarks rejected the racist scapegoating of eighty thousand people, insisting on Marseille’s cosmopolitanism and its openness, highly valued by Comorian immigrant communities, which are among the oldest in the city. Soprano consistently lauds his hometown of Marseille as the source of his musical inspiration, evincing the city’s cosmopolitanism as the secret to his success as an artist: “Here, I feel like I’m in the village, but I couldn’t say which one. I like the spirit of openness.”17 Soprano’s representation of Marseille as an ambiguous “back home” casts the city as a pluralistic, hybrid zone encompassing a number of different cultures, religions, and ethnicities. For example, the lyrics of Psy 4 de la Rime often lionize the group’s neighborhood, to which they refer as “Plan d’Aou City.” They claim to owe their creative energy and drive to the fusion of cultures and religions present there: “Here, there is joy and one can succeed. The mix of cultures and the spirit of sharing are advantageous to us.”18 In a sense, Marseille offers these rappers the freedom to practice their religion and live their Comorian culture without fear of reprisal. In their first album, Block Party (2002), they presented their high-rise quartiers nord housing project as the CD cover image, and crafted a

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narrative of the group’s own upbringing, describing a generation of young rappers struggling to achieve fame and status as groups before them had done. Soprano has transmitted an image of Marseille in his lyrics that was built by the previous generation of Marseille rappers. In his lyrics Soprano describes his foray into rap as the performing of an identity that, like that of previous groups IAM and Fonky Family, remains true to his Marseille roots. It was not his destiny to become a rapper, but writing was an outlet, as he says in “Le Divan” (Puisqu’il faut vivre, 2007): “Here’s what I am, a child of Madame France/ Who has only the microphone to tell that he exists.”19 In his music videos, Soprano has made use of the iconic imagery of Marseille which imbricates the local into the French-language technoscape; his webpages, advertisements, and viral videos that establish its web presence on the World Wide Web. Shots of Notre-Dame de la Garde feature prominently in his music videos, as do signs and images of Plan d’Aou. For example, Soprano attempts to build a symbolic bridge between the older generation of Marseillais and the younger in his video “À la bien” (Puisqu’il faut vivre, 2007).20 The opening sequence of the video shows a group of middle-aged men, boisterously conversing over pastis, Marseille’s famous liquor, in a local bar. When a video clip of Soprano’s song showing the Velodrome flashes up on the bar’s television, the men vociferously bemoan today’s youth and the inappropriateness of the link between soccer and rap music. Suddenly, a patron standing at the bar, who happens to be Éric Cantona, one of Marseille’s most famous soccer players, chastises the detractors, saying, “Leave those kids alone! They’ll be all good!” in his heavy Marseille accent.21 He then glares menacingly at the crowd, which quickly obeys the former soccer star, and seems to accept the hip-hop song. Soprano’s appropriation of the OM legacy (filming a rap video at the stadium, presenting Éric Cantona as a defender of his music) speaks volumes about the cohesiveness of the city’s diverse inhabitants. Although some cities such as Paris struggle with racism and hooliganism in their teams’ fan clubs, such as the Boulogne Boys, l’OM remains a unifying factor in the integration of youth in Marseille. *** In “Passe-moi le mic” (“Pass me the mic”) (Puisqu’il faut vivre, 2007), Soprano engages a variety of global issues that point to the many social contexts in which his artistic identity has been constructed. The song consists of a series of imperatives: Soprano implores his listener to hand

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him the microphone so that he may achieve a goal, transmit a message, and effect change. In doing so, Soprano names himself the representative of people, an act reminiscent of early American rap artists speaking for a segment of the population rarely seen or heard, namely, young marginalized people of color. The narratee that he creates exists only in the world of his songs. The narratee to whom Soprano addresses his song gives us an idea of who the rapper himself is. “Passe-moi le mic” is a slow-tempo song, but Soprano’s rapid-fire diction and his passion are evident as he literally screams some of the lyrics, so deep runs his conviction about his role as loudspeaker. His vision of France is fractured; the refrain of the song states, “We take up the mike for those who don’t have words”22 and those without voice, according to Soprano, are a variety of peoples, ideas, and communities: Pass me the mike so I can represent all these neighborhoods of France All those who suffer intolerance, the inequality of chances All this misery that the media disguises as delinquency! Passe moi le mic que je représente tous ces quartiers de France Tous ceux qui subissent l’intolérance, l’inégalité des chances Toute cette misère que les médias maquillent en délinquance !

Soprano calls out the French media for their whitewashing of the government’s responsibility to its citizens by framing the coverage of poverty and misery as delinquency. Soprano continues with a list of publics he purports to represent. They are social marginals: “these isolated mothers and alcoholic big brothers,” and working class French, “these cleaning ladies, fathers who work construction,” as well as undocumented immigrants, “the undocumented, the exiled, the expulsed, the colonized families who saw France as a land of liberty!”23 Soprano reaches out to society’s hidden, downtrodden, those least likely to have a voice and an advocate. Soprano shouts out to people living in his homeland, using the familiar term “bled”: “the cousins from the village who wash dishes to send home money,” referring to restaurant work, or other menial jobs, taken up so that one can send remittances to the islands. In addition to working class families, Soprano also claims to represent those affected by the tightening of the global economy: “those who earn minimum wage, those PhDs lounging on the dole!”24 He includes over-educated professionals who cannot find employment among those who share in the general misery of the population. Broadening his horizons beyond the entire Comorian archipelago, beyond Marseille, beyond all of France, Soprano speaks for an entire

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continent, melding issues of global import into his rhymes: “This indebted Africa, these not-yet-integrated French, this solidarity among starving peoples.” Lastly, Soprano casts his hometown of Marseille as a harmonious melting pot, by claiming to represent “this Islam of peace, this mixing between communities, the richness of mixed-races.”25 Although he appeals to different nationalities, ethnicities, and social classes, it seems that the only thing these groups have in common is that Soprano claims to represent them with his microphone. Clearly, the unemployed PhDs, to say nothing of world leaders, might not consider a twenty-something Comorian man from Marseille as their spokesperson. Nonetheless, the act of representing seems to be the focus of Soprano’s artistic energies. At the end of the song, Soprano shouts, “Give me some rap that represents! Give me the force, bro!”26 thus appealing to his fellow rappers (“frangin”) to return rap to its original purpose: to speak on behalf of others in an artistic way, with style, with form, supported by passion and meaning. In doing so, “Passe-moi le mic” demonstrates to the listener the many groups that benefit from thinking about the world’s problems in solidarity. Similarly, in “Ferme les yeux et imagine toi” (“Close your eyes and imagine yourself”) also from Puisqu’il faut vivre, Soprano implores his listeners to reconsider their complaints about daily life by imagining situations where they could be worse off. As in “Passe-moi le mic,” Soprano spouts a succession of far-reaching and variegated opposites, encouraging listeners to close their eyes and visualize the living conditions and experiences in which the majority of humanity suffers daily. In the accompanying video clip, Soprano is filmed standing alone in the desert sands, eyes closed, singing passionately about what his life could be like. The song begins with reggae artist Blacko singing a refrain that sets up the song’s theme: “We know very well what goes on elsewhere but we dare complain/ relate close your eyes imagine yourself.”27 In the song’s refrain, the lack of conjunctions in the sentence (“relativise ferme les yeux imagine-toi”) conveys a sense of urgency in the three imperatives. Soprano continues after Blacko’s refrain by describing the conditions in a nameless country: “In these countries where...”28 and then lists descriptions of the current conditions in the global South: Where the politicians wear military fatigues Where freedom of expression is a conspiracy Where the dollar “civilizes” with canons Where on can die of a simple fever Where diseases walk around without a leash You think you could really hold up in a heat wave In those countries where in two months you tan

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Où les hommes politiques sont en treillis Où la liberté d’expression est une conspiration Où le dollar civilise avec des canons Où on peut mourir d’une simple fièvre Où les épidémies se promènent sans laisse Crois-tu vraiment tenir sous la canicule De ces pays où pendant deux mois tu bronzes Eux toute l’année ils brûlent?

Soprano’s style of listing descriptive conditions, objects, and situations after a single theme, conjures up a “call-and-response” style that aids in structuring his vision of life in Marseille versus the nameless countries to which he alludes. Political regimes that rule by the gun, a lack of freedom of speech, and enslavement to American military and economic policy, are all critiqued by Soprano; the fourth and fifth verses use a play on images: the rhetorical image conjured up by diseases that walk “without a leash” are linked to “heat wave,” evoking the dog days of summer. Soprano alludes to middle class French people on vacation in hot climates such as Tunisia or Morocco, oblivious to the fact that some of their citizens are punished throughout the year by the scorching sun. Another contrast is evoked in the following verse: “Imagine your life without potable water/ a shower the days it rains” evoking the cruel irony that in places with limited access to clean drinking water the climate is often unpredictable. After these references implicating life in the global South, Soprano turns his attention toward Europe and Marseille: “Imagine yourself locked up like Natasha Kampusch/ or burned like Mama Galledou in the bus,”29 referring to two completely different crimes: the former, the Austrian girl who was held captive and abused for eight years (ending in 2006) and Mme Galledou, a Franco-Senegalese woman from Marseille who was severely burned when a group of rioting youths burned the bus she was riding. The two cases are unrelated and may seem hyperbolic to see them juxtaposed, but Soprano uses the notoriety of each crime to insist that one ought to appreciate one’s own life. Whom if any does Soprano blame for the conditions he describes? For Soprano, the “enemy” is less tangible and generally faceless. He seems to blame globalization, the world economy, and the east/west north/south divide; Soprano offers no “solution” to the misery, but implores his listeners to think about their own situations relative to more global issues, and to stop complaining. Soprano’s engagement with social issues also hits closer to home. Psy 4 de la Rime’s song “Ayié mama,” from their 2008 album Enfants de la

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lune constructs the Comorian family as a site of generational and gendered conflict for the young narrator, Soprano. In “Ayié mama,” the rapper seeks to locate himself in relation to two cultures, that of his mother, a Comorian immigrant, and that of contemporary France in which he finds himself living in a rough neighborhood of Marseille. The song displays a sensibility to the changing experiences of immigration in France.30 In theme, text, and style, “Ayié mama” is a “mother appreciation song;” a common theme in rap songs popular in American hip-hop culture; commercially successful rappers such as Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, and Tupac Shakur,31 for example, produced songs in which the rapper demonstrates admiration for his mother by alluding to her personal struggles, such as having raised a family under financial duress, dealing with her son’s delinquency and an absentee partner, among other themes. Soprano praises his mother’s fortitude while expressing regret for his own criminal and disrespectful behavior, painting a clear picture of their family dynamics. “Ayié mama” thus belongs to this tradition of mother-appreciation songs, but it also adds the family’s immigrant status into the discourse and context. The narrator, a young adult man, upon separating from his girlfriend, pleads his mother for forgiveness and understanding on account of his bad behavior, and his situation causes him to reflect on his mother’s choice to emigrate to Marseille. The mother-son relationship depicted here is one of discord; the song begins: “I wanted you to know that I never wanted to raise my voice to you/to hurt you.” Mother and son both share the same stubborn, volatile personality, yet family strife is exacerbated by the experience of inequality and poverty in France. The narrator states to his mother: “You chose France to save us, you fled suffering to raise us,” and “I know back in the village we’ve nothing to eat.”32 “Ayié mama” expresses the existential crisis of the immigrant: how can a young Marseillais of Comorian origin be expected to inhabit two spaces at once? The narrator feels alterity toward his mother, and she to him, based on their different life trajectories: I am born of this Comorian people/the result of two beings You gave birth to me here but your heart was back there I grew up here but you wanted to see me to live back there Je suis né de ce peuple comorien/ l’aboutissement de deux êtres… Tu m’as fait naître ici mais ton coeur était là-bas Moi j’ai grandi ici mais tu voudrais me voir vivre là-bas

The “two beings” so evoked symbolize France and the islands where the narrator’s mother lived, and also where she wished he had grown up.

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Moreover, his mother’s ideals of France are contrasted with her ideals of what life would be like for her and her son if they lived in the Comoros. A certain ideal of the Comoros as emblematized in the narrator’s family strife does not live up to his previously held notions, and likewise, the mother’s image of the Comoros does not live up to the one in France. Soprano’s song critiques the Comorian tradition of the Great Wedding, one of the most noteworthy elements in the culture, a symbol of “two beings” and second-generation conflict. For Comorians in France, the anda (Great Wedding), is a ritual of tantamount cultural and social significance. Characterized by extravagant spending and a lavish multiday public ceremony, the anda is an important obligation meant to establish and maintain one’s social status in the community (Walker 2002: 157). It is a major cause for emigration—Comorians work abroad to be able to afford the costs of the ceremony and the obligatory exchanges of expensive gifts—and the majority of Comorian immigrants’ remittances are used to finance the anda (Beauval 2011: 2). As an example of the astronomical costs of this ceremony, the average anda in Moroni costs upwards of forty five thousand Euros (Thierry and Axus 2007: 13) while the average annual household income is estimated at between eight hundred and twelve hundred dollars.33 In “Ayié Mama” the son’s ideas of his origins are changed by what he sees in France: My opinion of Comorian weddings has even gotten worse Don’t ask me any more to change My wounds are still fresh since my father got remarried, You know, it’s difficult for me to see all those millions wasted When I know that in the village, we have nothing to eat, And you plunged yourself deep into debt, in tons of problems, You’re losing weight, you’re building up debts for all these trifles You didn’t see the harm you were doing yourself How many [people] have fun then get lost after your big party. Et mon opinion du mariage comorien a même empiré, Ne me demande plus de changer, Mais plaies se sont encore plus allé depuis que mon père s’est remarié, Tu sais, pour moi c’est dur de voir tous ces millions gaspillés Quand je sais qu’au bled coco, on a rien à manger, En plus t’es plongée dans des dettes, dans des tas de soucis, Tu maigris, t’accumules les crédits pour tous ces tas de conneries, Vous ne voyiez pas le mal que vous faites, Combien vous font plaisir et se taillent dès que finie votre grande fête

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Soprano expresses concern for his mother’s health (the roles are now reversed), and discontentment at the tradition of the Great Wedding. Read contextually with Soprano’s concern for poverty, this song is part of a growing number of younger Comorians’ contestation of the tradition of great wedding.34 Thus, in this song a double presence is evoked, symbolized by the son’s respect for his mother. *** Soprano’s video “A la bien” (Puisqu’il faut vivre 2006) conveys the rapper’s sense of self and community through the representation of the neighborhood and the physical surroundings in which he lives. Several moments in the video emphasize a branding of Marseille as a cosmopolitan space. The establishing shot of the scene, to which the camera refers back at least twelve times throughout, portrays Soprano standing atop the city looking down at the Mediterranean Sea and the vast expanse of buildings and neighborhoods that make up Marseille. The first word spoken is, “Marseille!” (Although this is not listed on the official lyrics, suggesting that it is a spontaneous cry from the rapper) and then Soprano points back to the city. He is framed next to Notre-Dame de la Garde, Marseille’s most famous monument; seven shots are edited in sequence, which establishes the diversity of the city: the sea, the brick rooftops in a terracotta color, the ubiquitous construction cranes, the shipping area, the Vieux Port, finally Soprano’s own housing project, located in the quartiers nord. The camera frames Soprano exiting his housing block through the common front door (suggesting that even as a rich and famous recording artist, he remains a member of the community from which he came), and he holds a bottled water and a straw, which adds to the “slice of life” staging of this video, and also highlights the fact that Soprano sees himself as refined. Soprano casually walks through the courtyard of his housing project, gesturing at the various people, members of his crew and his fans, who are hanging about on stairwells and on the sidewalk. As Soprano lip syncs the song lyrics, he gestures toward the groups of people framed in the shot with him: groups of boys and young women strut along wearing typical hip-hop fashions: cross-body bags, tshirts, athletic wear, and baseball caps. Soprano describes his youth and the diversity within his community as the camera cuts to various sequences that support his lyrics. In one scene he is pictured conversing with his friends, sitting in a working class living room; the cozy touches (flowers, afghans hanging on the wall) suggest that it is a lived-in space, and not just a music video set. In the next sequence, as he pronounces the

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lyrics “my youth has the world as a next door neighbor”35, Soprano is depicted atop the hill, and he gestures toward the other side of the ocean, suggesting that Marseille youth are neighbors to their peers in Africa and the Middle East, separated only by an ocean. The next sequence shows a group of Soprano’s posse drinking thé à la menthe using a traditional North African tea service. These elements—the tea set, hanging out in stairwells, and the working class apartment—might be familiar to Soprano’s fans. But most importantly, rather than flaunt the trappings of wealth and status, which is a trope in contemporary hip-hop, Soprano chooses to align himself with his fans and the youth who listen to his music through the representation of his daily life. The video contains mini-narratives that illustrate some of the problems and injustices that the community Soprano purports to represent faces. The video thus moves from semi-performance mode to narrative mode in two scenes that depict Soprano and his crew as the victims of prejudicial treatment based on their skin color and ethnicity. For instance, a sequence that takes place on Marseille’s famous Corniche John F. Kennedy (a long, snaking road following the sea that links the Vieux Port with the southern districts) highlights the infamous identity checks by the police which rappers frequently denounce in their lyrics. Soprano raps about himself and his friends preparing for a night on the town (a process that includes purchasing a new pair of sneakers, eating fries, and driving along the Corniche cruising for women), with shots depicting each step edited together in rapid sequence. Then Soprano is depicted in a close-up, standing against his car, hands behind his back; the camera cuts to a wideangle shot of an identity check. A white police officer rifles through Soprano’s pockets and pats his body down while another officer stands guard, threateningly tapping his nightstick against his hand. The lyrics, “a police control to ruin the night/ I don’t smoke weed, nor Marlboro Lights,” emphasize how unwelcome and unjust the police’s stop-and-search action is for the rappers, but also how nonchalant and routine it has become for young North African and African youth. The identity control ends only when two beautiful women walk by the car, causing the police officer to turn his head. Soprano then raps the lyric, “on the Corniche, you think you’re rich!”36 and the camera focuses on his face, as he mugs an expression of frustration, suggesting that even fame and fortune are trumped by being black. Another commonplace, the humiliating ritual of being turned away at a nightclub on account of one’s appearance, is illustrated in the following sequence. The camera cuts to a shot depicting two athletic-looking bouncers standing in front of a nightclub door, one of whom shakes his hand “no” as one of Soprano’s crew members is denied

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entry at the door. The lyrics (which are sung) enter, “you got turned down at the club/don’t worry, there’s music in the Clio,”37 as the young man, with his friend in tow, throws up a peace sign in disgust, shakes his head, and is forced to do a walk of shame between a gauntlet of club-goers who promptly jeer him as he exits. However, the patrons waiting in line hoping to enter the club are themselves a diverse crowd of black, white, and Arab men and women, and thus it appears that they are laughing with him, not at him, since they might have experienced the same racist/prejudiced treatment at some point. The lyric, “il y a du son dans la Clio” offers an alternative to club-going, suggesting that this action happens often enough that even Soprano and his crew have learned to deal with it. *** In this essay, I have attempted to demonstrate how Soprano’s lyrics and self-styling as “the result of two beings” are informed by Marseille’s cosmopolitanism. While he displays a sensibility toward pressing global issues in his music, he also touches on issues that affect the community of some eighty thousand Comorians in Marseille. Soprano’s identity is constructed and articulated in ways that avoid the “problem” of identifying with the rigid notion “Frenchness” as it is constructed in dominant discourses. It is clear that Salim Hatubou’s question, raised earlier in this essay, whether Comorians from Marseille identify first as Comorians or first as Marseillais remains relevant today in querying the parameters of an identity that seems to permit citizens to evade racial classifications by instead expressing attachment to the city. Without performing a contrasting study of rappers of Comorian origin who reside in Paris or who claim Paris as the source of their musical and artistic inspiration, it seems that the case of the rapper Soprano offers us a vision of Marseille as a new space of innovation for postcolonial cultures in France.

Notes 1 The most poignant of these is perhaps “Parle-moi” (Puisqu’il faut vivre, 2007), a song dedicated to a son he had at age sixteen who was placed for adoption by the child’s mother. Soprano never met his son, and in “Parle-moi” he expresses that each year he celebrates his child’s birthday and prays for him. 2 The four members of Psy 4 de la Rime are all Muslim sons of immigrants of France’s former colonies: Comorian Kassim D’Jae uses the moniker Segnor Alonzo, while Saïd M’Roubaba and Iliassa Issilame, of Comorian descent as well (their families are from the largest island, Grand Comore), use Soprano and Don

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Vincenzo, respectively. Rachid Ait-Baar, the group’s DJ, is of Moroccan origin and uses Sya Styles as his name. They were all born in the early 1980s and spent their youth rapping and producing homemade mixtapes in the Plan d’Aou housing project in Marseille’s northern districts. 3 Rohff was born Housni M’Kouboi on 15 December 1977 in Mbéni, Grand Comores and emigrated to Vitry-sur-Seine at the age of eight. He began rapping in 1994 as part of the Parisian group Mafia K’1 Fry, and has since released four albums and at least sixty singles and compilations, including one single with Soprano. 4 Le Troisième Oeil is comprised of two members, Jo Popo, born on Reunion Island, and Boss One, from the Comoros, and their two DJs, DJ Ralph and DJ Bomb. Their first album, Hier, Aujourd’hui et Demain (1999) on which appears one of the best-known and most popular Marseille hip-hop songs, “Hymne à la racaille de France” (from Hier, Aujourd’hui et Demain), sold one hundred thousand copies, and they followed in 2002 with Avec le Coeur ou Rien. 5 Cheikh MC, born Abderémane Cheikh in 1978, is credited with bringing rap to the Comoros Islands. He began rapping in 1995 with his group “Les Pirates du Mika,” before breaking out as a solo artist, performing concert tours throughout the Francophone Indian Ocean. He has produced two albums, Tout Haut (2005) and L’Enfant du tiers monde, raps and sings in both French and Comorian. His collaborations with artists such as Soprano and Troisième Oeil have increased his visibility in France. 6 “La première ville des Comores” and “La cinquième île comorienne,” respectively. 7 The concept of being Comorian itself is not a function of citizenship, but one of culture and ancestry; social organization is matrilineal and residency is matrilocal. 8 For a brief history, see , December 2013. 9 A list of Comorian association appears on , December 2013. 10 See bibliography for newspaper articles (Groussard, Koch) describing Ali’s murder. 11 Ali’s murder was dramatized in Marseille-based director Robert Guédiguian’s 2000 film The Town is Quiet. 12 “Ce fait divers a cependant pour avantage de révéler à ceux qui l’ignoraient qu’il y avait à Marseille 50,000 Comoriens et 150,000 en France!” 13 “Lagier a été violemment agressé par une quinzaine de Comoriens...les colleurs d'affiches ont tiré en l'air en direction de leurs agresseurs.” 14 “C’est la faute de l’immigration massive et incontrôlée.” 15 “Il y a une immigration comorienne importante qui est la cause de beaucoup de violences. Je ne peux pas la quantifier.” 16 “On a un problème récent de violences de personnes comoriennes, pas de Français d'origine comorienne.” 17 “Ici j’ai l’impression d’être au bled, mais je ne pourrais pas dire lequel. J’aime cet esprit d’ouverture.”

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“Il y a de la joie et on peut réussir. Le mélange des cultures, l’esprit du partage sont nos avantages. » , December 2013. 19 “Voilà ce que je suis, un enfant de Madame France/ Qui n’a que le mic pour dire qu’il existe.” 20 “A la bien” is a popular colloquialism used in Marseille that means, roughly, “all good!” 21 “Laissez-les tranquilles ces jeunes. Ils vont faire à la bien!” 22 “On prend le mic pour ceux qui n’ont pas la parole.” 23 “Ces mères isolées, ces grands frères alcolisés,” “ces femmes de ménage, ces pères au chantier” 24 “Ces cousins du bled qui font la plonge pour envoyer de la thune,” “ceux qui touchent le smic, tous ces bac plus 8 qui squattent l’Assedic.” 25 “Cette Afrique endettée, ces Français pas encore intégrés, cette solidarité entre peuples affamés.” 26 “Donne-moi du rap qui représente! donne-moi la force frangin!” 27 “On sait très bien ce qui se passe ailleurs mais on ose se plaindre/ relativise ferme les yeux imagine-toi.” 28 “Dans ces pays où…” 29 “Imagine ta vie sans eau potable/ une douche les jours de pluie” “Imagine-toi enfermé comme Natasha Kampusch/ ou brulé comme Mama Galledou dans le bus.” 30 I refer to the cycles of migration to France, in particular that of Comorians. Soprano and his contemporaries, now in their early 30s, are considered part of the “third generation” and were all French-born. 31 Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama” (1995) was written in dedication to Afeni Shakur, the rapper’s mother and former Black Panther activist. Tupac recounts his mother’s struggles to keep young Tupac out of trouble and to provide for his basic needs despite her being single and on welfare. Many similarities exist between this song and “Ayié Mama.” 32 “Je voulais que tu saches que je n’ai jamais voulu hausser la voix contre toi/ te faire de la peine” “T’as choisi la France pour nous sauver, t’as fui la souffrance pour nous élever” and “je sais qu’au bled coco on n’a rien à manger.” 33 Figures gleaned from the websites of the CIA World Factbook and France Diplomatie. See bibliography for details. 34 For example, see Soeuf Elbadawi, “Le grand-mariage de l’indignité” RFI (Web), 9 September 2005. 35 “Ma jeunesse a le monde comme voisin de palier” 36 “Un contrôle de flic pour gâcher la nuit/je fume pas de shit, ni de Marlboro Light” “sur la Corniche, on s’imagine riche!” 37 “Tu t’es fait pointer en boite/ t’inquiéte, y a du son dans la Clio.”

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References Beauval, Stéphane. “Le Grand mariage, ascenseur social comorien.” 9 December 2008, Med’ in Marseille. Web. 11 November 2011. Bonnefoy, Coralie. “Marseille: pléiade de stars au concert Solidarité Comores.” 23, January 2010. La Provence. Web. 11 November 2011. “Cheikh MC.” Radio France International, 2011. Web. 10 March 2012. “Comoros.” CIA World Factbook, 12 April 2012. Web. 20 April 2012. Cruz, Vincent, Wolfgang Fengler, and Adam Schwartzman. “Remittances to Comoros.” Africa Region Working Paper Series 75: (October 2004): 1-31. France Diplomatie, 20 November 2011. Web. 24 April 2012. Elbadawi, Soeuf. “Le grand-mariage de l’indignité” RFI 9 September 2005. Web. 26 April 2012. Groussard, Daniel. “Marseille: Ibrahim, tué à 17 and par des colleurs d’affiches du FN.” La Liberation 23 February 1995. Web. 1 March 2012. Halifa, Azad. De Marseille aux Comores: entré en politique d’une jeunesse issue de l’immigration. Paris: Levallois-Perret, 2007. Hamdi, Hamadieta. “Les Psy 4 promettent un show inoubliable.” Comoresonline.net, 2 septembre 2011. Web. 11 November 2011. Hawkins, Peter. The Other Hybrid Archipelago. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Harzoune, Mustapha. “Un fil entre les Comores et Marseille.” Hommes et Migrations, 1253 (January-February 2005): 118-121. Hatubou, Salim. “Comoriens de Marseille, ou Marseillais des Comores?” L’Humanité 19, June 1999. Web. 20 April 2012. Koch, François. “Un crime raciste en procès.” L’Express 6 April 1998. Web. 23 April, 2012. Lorcerie, François and Vincent Gessier. Muslims in Marseille. New York: Open Society Foundations, 2011. M’Madi, Iza. “Psy 4 de la Rime enfin sur scène aux Comores.” Comoresonline.net. 2 septembre 2011. Web. 28 April 2012. —. “Psy 4 de la Rime: ils ont allumé le feu vendredi au stade de Moroni.” Comoresonline.net. 5 Septembre 2011. Web. 23 April 2012. Psy 4 de la Rime Official Site, 2012. Skyrock. Web. 11 November 2011. Renaud, Dely. “Le Pen prédit des ‘révélations’ sur le meurtre d’Ibrahim Ali.” Libération, 3 April 1995. Web. 26 April 2012. Slimani-Direche, Karina. Les Comoriens à Marseille: d’une mémoire à l'autre. Paris: Editions Autrement, 2002.

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Soprano. Interview by Grégory Martin-Aude. “Soprano, ‘Ici, j’ai l’impression d’être au bled.’” Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, 2012. Web. 20 April 2012. Soprano, Official Site, 2012. Emi Music France, Web, 26 April 2012. “Tchat en direct avec Soprano.” Published instant messages. La Provence. 13 November 2007. Web. 20 April 2012. Thierry, Benoît and Anne-Laue Axus. “Valoriser les potentialités économiques de la diaspora comorienne pour le développement de l’archipel.” FIDA Publication. August 2007. 1-16. Un Chanteur, une ville (#3): Marseille, par Soprano. Dir. Hilaire Zou and Pierre Boisselet. 2011. Online video clip. 20 April 2012. Vivier, Geraldine. “Les Associations Comoriennes en France: Processus Migratoires, Identités et Transformations Sociales.” Hommes et Migrations Hors Dossier, 1226 (July-August 2000): 58-73. Walker, Iain. “Les aspects économiques du grand mariage de Ngazidja (Comores), Autrepart (23): 2002: 157-171.

CHAPTER SEVEN TRANSNATIONAL FRANCOPHONIES IN CONTEMPORARY ART: VISUALIZING FRANCO-MAGHREBI CROSSINGS SIOBHÁN SHILTON UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

Contemporary art reveals a striking proliferation of works exploring the complex cross-cultural identities that have resulted from a long history of immigration to France. The abundance of works of art visualizing “Franco-Maghrebi” identities, across diverse media—including video, installation, performance and photography—is particularly marked. Yet, studies of representations of immigration and diaspora in “Francophone” contexts have tended to privilege literary—and, more recently, filmic— genres.1 How might works of art reveal distinctive means of presenting cross-cultural–indeed, diversely transnational–identities? How does artwork draw on specific media and materials to produce visual or multisensorial languages in parallel to the linguistic “grafting” or codeswitching characteristic of literature exploring the Maghrebi diaspora in France? How does it visualize certain postcolonial concepts in an uneven, globalized frame? This chapter addresses these questions in relation to selected installations by the Paris-based artist Kader Attia (b. 1970, SeineSaint-Denis). Artwork exploring Franco-Maghrebi identities and spaces tends to fall into one of two overlapping corpora. The first, and most extensive, body of artwork focuses on transcultural identities in the “diaspora space” (Brah 1996: 16). Reminiscent of their literary counterparts, certain works explore the themes of alienation, exile or the search for integration, while others communicate more optimistically—albeit ambivalently—experiences of multiple belonging. Contrasting examples can be found in Sedira’s poignant video Don’t do to her what you did to me (1998-2001) and Bouabdellah’s parodic video installation Dansons (2003). Works such as

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Sedira’s 3-screen video installation, Mother, Father and I (2003), provide visual parallels to literary explorations of the theme of témoignage; this multisensorial contrapuntal work highlights discrepant gendered and generational experiences of the Algerian War and immigration to France. Other works engage explicitly with Republican discourse to highlight the complexity of debates concerning the place of Islam in France through a corporeal performance of transculturation. This is diversely exemplified by Majida Khattari’s défilé–performances (1996–present), Yohan Leforestier’s street performance (2011) and Alain Bizos’ photographic work (Liberté, égalité, fraternité, 2005). This vast and heterogeneous corpus converges in its indication of the persistence of tensions and unevenness in the “host” society, but also its resistance to clichés of perceived cultural—and, frequently, gendered—difference. Moreover, it evokes a complex, multidirectional critique of alternative extremisms and new “imperialisms” from both within and beyond France and the Maghreb. While these works allude to Maghrebi cultures—or to perceptions of the Maghrebi diasporic community—certain recent works also incorporate journeys to or within Maghrebi and Mediterranean spaces. In such works—produced predominantly in video and photography—the inextricably linked activities of travelling and imaging generate new ways of visualizing diversity. Indeed, the use of the peripatetic mode leads to a range of intersubjective encounters between traveler and “travellee,” signaling new directions in the artistic evocation of cross-cultural identities. Such work frequently focuses on a “return” to the Maghreb in a personal quest for the artist’s “roots,” while emphasizing the complexity of “home” in a postcolonial context: examples can be found in Katia Kameli’s Bledi, a possible scenario (2004; video), Bruno Boudjelal’s Jours intranquilles: chroniques algériennes d’un retour (1993-2003; photography), Nadia Benchallal’s D’une rive à l’autre (2004; photography) and Malik Nejmi’s El Maghreb (2001-2005; photography and soundtrack). Other works tend to foreground, instead—or in addition—society at large, often exploring the contradictoriness of an Algeria or Morocco in a state of transition; particularly illustrative of this tendency are photographic series Nadia Ferroukhi’s Chroniques algériennes (2000-present; photography and soundtrack) and Yto Barrada’s Le Projet du Détroit (1998-2004; photography, video and installation). While all works in this corpus are formed of images captured during the course of a literal journey, some focus on the idea of travel and/or the Mediterranean as a site of travel: Zineb Sedira’s Saphir (2006; video installation and photography), Bouchra Khalili’s Straight stories:

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Part I or The Mapping Journey Project (2004, 2008-11; video and video installation) and Yto Barrada’s Le Projet du Détroit are (contrasting) cases in point. Despite contextual, thematic or aesthetic divergences, the impetus for these works visualizing Maghrebi or Mediterranean spaces lies primarily in the perceived need to provide a counterpoint to reductive exoticist or miserabilist representations of the region in the “Western” media.2 For example, reportage focusing on the civil war in Algeria or the plight of clandestine immigrants from Tangiers to Gibraltar. Alternatively, these works critique the imposition of perceived political and physical “barriers” to two-way cultural exchange in the form of EU policy on immigration. These works tend to engage simultaneously with the evolving internal political and socio-cultural climates and official visions of the country in question. Such art recalls the more extensive corpus of literature depicting a “return” from France to countries in the Maghreb, which began to emerge in the 1980s (see especially Silverstein 2004). However, it responds more specifically both to visual mediations of the region from outside and to highly regulated internal processes of image production and consumption. Elsewhere, I have shown how work in the plastic arts can be seen to call for a nuanced understanding of the terms “transculturation” and “counterpoint,” which are often cited in postcolonial literary criticism.3 Artwork evoking Franco-Maghrebi encounters is frequently reminiscent of transculturation, as understood by Mary Louise Pratt (1992),4 in its emphasis on selection and adaptation, as well as reciprocal influence between individual, identifiable cultures. The co–existence, in such art, of cultural elements indicative of interrelated, yet distinct, histories equally calls to mind Edward Said’s notion of “counterpoint” (Said 1994 [1993]). In order to highlight alternative, yet intertwined, histories of colonialism, Said theorises a “contrapuntal” reading practice whereby the critic interprets a novel with a “simultaneous awareness” of both colonial and counter–colonial themes. This allows an “alternate privileging” and interplay of these themes, in a manner similar to counterpoint in music. However, artwork tends to exceed the two-way dynamic that is evoked by both Pratt and Said. For it involves a more complex combination of references—both “vertical” and transversal—to diverse national, regional, local and global cultural spaces. The renegotiation, in such artwork, of alternative perceived hegemonies is reminiscent of Khatibi’s “double critique” of essentialist tendencies in both Western and (in his case) Islamic traditions (Khatibi 1983).5 Khatibi’s “double critique” involves opposing totalising ideologies formulated in either French or Arabic by

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thinking “otherwise, in multilingual ways, listening to any utterance– wherever it may be coming from” (1983: 63).6 Postcolonial art allows for multiple—including untranslatable—voices and visions. However, by contrast to its literary counterparts, it evokes, through non-narrative means, a plurality of possible discourses, and involves the spectator in the formation of discourse. Moreover, as Jean Fisher asserts, “Visual art remains a materially based process, functioning on the level of affect, not purely semiotics, i.e., a synesthetic relation is established between work and viewer, which is in excess of visuality” (2005: 234). Postcolonial art tends to juxtapose disjunctive signifiers and sensorial elements to refer to apparently stable visual forms while simultaneously “exceeding” them. A number of installations from Kader Attia’s extensive and varied oeuvre converge with the two interconnected bodies of art exploring a diversely transnational Franco-Maghrebi space. The autobiographical video installation Correspondance (2003) visualises the artist’s journey from France to Algeria for the purpose of exchanging messages between members of his family on both sides of the Mediterranean. La Machine à rêves (2008 [2002-3]) explores the experience of identity conflict for those born in France to Muslim immigrants, with a particular focus on the discrepancy between religious tradition and “Western” consumerism. A more ambiguous alignment of the spiritual and the mercantile can be discerned in Ghost (2007). This installation can be seen to point to discourses of social exclusion in France and beyond, while it also suggests the fragility and vulnerability of the human condition. Holy Land (2006) evokes the treacherous–often fatal–clandestine crossings from the Maghreb to Europe, resonating with artwork such as Barrada’s Projet du Détroit and Khalili’s Mapping Journeys, as well as literature such as Tahar Benjelloun’s Partir (2006) or Mahi Binebine’s Cannibales (2005). However, Holy Land, exceptionally, explores this theme through the use of installation. Kader Attia’s work reveals distinctive means of exceeding clichés in the amorphous and all-encompassing medium of installation art.7 Each installation demonstrates particular uses of time and space, as well as alternative combinations of the verbal, the visual, the auditory and the kinaesthetic, to evoke transnational entanglements while allowing the untranslatable to emerge.

Visualising Diversity: Renegotiating “Home” in Video Installation Attia’s Correspondance (2003), provides an example of artwork that visualizes transnational identities through the incorporation of a journey of

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“return”8 The single-channel video in this installation is presented as an “album” connecting the artist’s family in the suburbs of Paris with his family in a rural area of Algeria; an initial note reads: “In every instance of separation a link is maintained through the exchange of photos and video footage. This is my family album, and could be that of many others.”9 The video consists of two parts, the first of which depicts excerpts of his journey from France to Algeria in color digital video, interspersed with monochrome photographs of the Parisian banlieue. The fragments of “real time” footage capture primarily members of the artist’s family engaged in everyday activities as they converse with the artist. The second part is filmed in a living room in Algeria and focuses on Attia’s cousin Samira who, prompted by the artist, discusses, light-heartedly, her desire to marry his brother and join him in France. As their conversation continues, the video footage gives way, on occasion, to monochrome photographs of the brother. The video is played in a dark room, which is reached via an adjoining space in which photographs of images from the first part of the video are pegged onto two “drying” lines between which the viewer passes. The work consists of various levels of signification, which link together distinct concentric spatio-temporal “frames”: the monochrome photographs indicative of the recent past in France; the “real time” color footage, indicative of the “present” in Algeria; the references that are made to the future reception of this footage by the family in France; and the textual additions via which the artist addresses the further “future” cross-cultural viewing public. These include the initial note, as well as subtitles in French; the artist’s role as passeur is doubled as he mediates for the viewer. Re-arranged and transposed into a multi-part installation artwork, the personal images and messages, which were originally intended to be exchanged between members of the artist’s family, become triggers with which to engage the spectator in a wider transcultural, transmedial process. Correspondance is foremost an exploration of continuity and discontinuity in diaspora, while it contributes to the wider enterprise of imaging the transnational relationship between France and Algeria in relational, contrapuntal ways. It forges a means of visualizing Algeria that avoids reifying iconic images of exoticism or war. The video in Correspondance echoes literary depictions of the “return” in its demonstration of the omnipresence of the “other” culture, regardless of geographical location. The oscillation between discrepant spaces and times is reminiscent of that in novels such as Houari’s Zeida de nulle part (1985) in which the protagonist’s present reality in Belgium is disrupted by memories of time spent in Morocco. Upon her return to the country she had

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left as a young child, constant references to Europe—including comments on her “European” behaviour—highlight the inevitably transcultural identity of the diasporic subject. However, Attia’s non-narrative demonstration of a contrapuntal consciousness involves the alternation between visual and auditory signifiers, or germs of potential narratives, which it calls upon the viewer to interrelate. Moreover, this temporal contrapuntal process is compounded by the vertical, simultaneous “layering” of spaces and times through visual, auditory and verbal elements in French, Arabic and English, including conversations, excerpts of radio footage, song lyrics and subtitles. This process extends into the installation space in which the viewer connects the selected photographs with the sounds of the looping video. In the experience of contrapuntal artwork, the spectators themselves are involved actively in the construction and reconstruction of discourse. Multisensorial elements in the video are juxtaposed or superimposed to allude to discrepant national, local, regional and global cultures. Thus, a series of still monochrome images of high rise blocks with bare trees which, the viewer assumes, depict the artist’s local neighborhood in the suburbs of Paris is followed by video footage focusing on a lost Mini Mouse balloon. Meanwhile, we hear an advertisement on the French radio for tickets for Muslim pilgrims to Mecca. The shot of the global Disney object gives way to one of the tail of an aeroplane displaying the national “Air Algérie” logo. The journey itself is summarized visually through the subsequent series of photographs, one from the window of an aeroplane and the others from a car. (The distance between France and Algeria appears reduced through this use of montage in a way that is reminiscent of Zineb Sedira’s video of a flight from London to Algiers in Between Departing and Arriving (2003-6).) In Algeria, the family’s correspondence evokes multiple journeys, both undertaken and potential, as they send congratulations to the artist’s mother for her pilgrimage to Mecca and tell his brothers to come and visit, or—in Samira’s case—anticipate a journey to France. The audio-visual exchange between members of the artist’s family is echoed by a wider transcultural, multidirectional process of “correspondence.” The diversity and transnationalism of “Algeria” is communicated via images ranging from a shot of a man’s hands around a ka’aba memento (evocative, once more, of a journey to Mecca) to a shot of the front cover of Libération magazine displaying the Algerian flag. Over the latter shot, we hear a woman commenting on her replacement of fermented milk with the global product Danao. A shot of a man praying outdoors against the backdrop of a building site is accompanied by an incongruous excerpt of the American singer Moby’s Why does my heart feel so bad? This

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transglobal track is retained as the camera shifts to focus on an image emptied of cultural specificity: a blue sky, a swooping bird, a floating plastic bag. The subsequent shot, showing the ka’aba memento, is overlaid with an Algerian dance music track, which is maintained throughout the following scene showing two men drinking tea at a café against the backdrop of a Coca-Cola poster. Thus, signifiers of the political, the religious and the economic are perpetually recombined to convey a plural “Algeria” that exceeds imagined “national” boundaries and forges connections–both vertical and lateral–with the U.S., Saudi Arabia and France, specifically the (subnational) Algerian diaspora in France. Counterpoint is demonstrated—and triggered in the viewer—through a palimpsestic, spatio-temporal process of audio-visual telescoping. However, readings of “Algeria” that would foreground political, cultural or social specificity are effectively combined with transglobal music tracks and “neutral spaces.” The transcultural process allows the interplay of elements that are “untranslatable,” exceeding discourse.

Illustration 7-1. Kader Attia: Correspondance, video, courtesy, the artist and Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Paris, 2003

Visual signifiers that could be related to iconic signs or official histories of Algeria—thus potentially accruing singular meanings—are equally exceeded by the persistent recourse to private, familial spaces and

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personal messages, as well as to everyday practices. In presenting images of women talking and cooking at home or people drinking tea in a café, Correspondance visualizes the “non-image,” or the space between images, filming that which is not usually represented. A striking example of the everyday emerges in an extended sequence showing Samira belly dancing in her living room. This spontaneous dance in an unspectacular, domestic setting—performed, moreover, as part of a project to strengthen crosscultural connections—contrasts markedly with Orientalist clichés of belly dancing.10 The artist’s visit to the site where his relatives are buried supplies a further, poignant example of visualizing the “invisible” by exploring the intimate and the personal. Providing a counterpoint to the sequence filming the sky, the camera sustains a high-angle shot of the grave stones among the overgrown grass before the artist’s feet, evoking a quest for roots while visualizing an alternative space. In the installation, images of these gravestones occupy the usually empty space along the bottom of the gallery wall; their encasement in Plexiglas in an art gallery endows them with a new, privileged status, while this mode of presentation can also be related to the preservation and fetishization of memories through photography. The photographs of gravestones–and, elsewhere, of old family photographs–draw attention to the message that Barthes identified as inherent in this medium–ça a été (1980) while adding a further temporal “layer”—ça avait été—to the transcultural mise-enabyme presented by this work. The everydayness of the other images emerges emphatically through their hanging as washing on a line, which equally recalls the process of developing photographs, and of constructing images, more widely. Moreover, the subjective art-making process is evident throughout the video in the persistent indication of the hors champ–specifically, the artist’s presence–through his voice and the looks and comments directed towards him, together with the movement of the camcorder as he walks. Echoing the re-appropriation of the French language in postcolonial literature, Correspondance combines the media of video and photography, associated originally with “Western” modes of seeing and travelling, from colonial journeys of “discovery” and ethnographic archiving to photojournalism and tourism. It re-uses these visual (or audio-visual) languages to convey complex transnational and transhistorical entanglements and reciprocity. Correspondance effects a rapprochement of distinct spatio-temporal frames through the transcultural, transmedial juxtaposition, superimposition or mise-en-abyme of images, sound and text.11 Moreover, while the start of the artist’s journey is visualized, the proceeding juxtaposition of fragments, or germs of allusive micro-narratives,

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communicates a complex, non-linear process of cultural overlap and deferral of the “return home”; the impression of endless detour is reinforced, in this medium, by the looping video. Furthermore, while visual representations of the southward journey have tended conventionally to privilege images captured while moving at speed, Correspondance foregrounds “vertical travel,” which Cronin describes as a “temporary dwelling in a location for a period of time where the traveler begins to travel down into the particulars of place either in space […] or in time” (2000: 19). Such episodes supply the conditions for spontaneous, reciprocal encounters between traveler and “travellee.” In postcolonial “travel video” the visualization of such encounters introduces a certain amount of contingency into the work. That is, while the route to be adopted by the traveller-artist tends, at least to some extent, to be planned in advance, and the material filmed on the journey is manipulated subsequently, the interdependent processes of travelling and filming produce a large amount of footage of the spontaneous actions and speech of those being filmed. Attia’s video visualizes moments of the “horizontal” journey, while it focuses predominantly on episodes of vertical travel, including the prolonged exchange with Samira. The incorporation of a certain amount of unpredictability is an important feature of relational visual aesthetics, given the history of Orientalist representation and construction of non-European people as “watched” (Said 1995: 103). In works such as Correspondance the “representation” is, at least in some measure, constructed by those being filmed; the artwork emerges in the unplanned exchange between traveler and “travellee.” The artwork depends on a further contingent element; that is, the spectator’s response, which relies on their cultural and linguistic knowledge, as well as their own histories of travel (transcultural artwork tends frequently to respond to—and to highlight—the unevenness of its diverse global public). The spectator’s role in the contrapuntal process becomes more emphatic in the installation space, particularly after they have viewed the video. The process of alternate privileging continues as they connect the images they have just seen, and the music and dialogue that they can still hear, with the photographs in the installation. While, in Correspondance, the time-based medium of video is employed in ways that contribute to the contrapuntal, yet multiperspectival, process of alternate privileging of discrepant spaces and times, in La Machine à rêves (2008 [2002-3]) this process is triggered in the spectator solely through the simultaneous juxtaposition of disjunctive visual and verbal elements.

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Visualising Invisibility: Installation, Sculpture and the Space between12 La Machine à rêves explores the diaspora space of France, focusing on the conflict between religion and “Western” consumer society experienced by those of Muslim immigrant descent.13 This installation consists of a larger-than-life-size female mannequin, dressed in designer jeans, sport jacket and headscarf, facing a vending machine replete with Halal products. This ensemble of real and mock products ranges from sweets, bubble gum, stock and Maghrebi “chorba” (soup) to cigarettes, lipstick, botox, condoms, a contraceptive pill, and Prozac, as well as designer “hallal” handbags and a “string hallal.” Along with the Halal products is a packet containing a “Fashion Chador,” a U.S. passport and a silver Mastercard belonging to the artist, together with two books by Redak Atita (an anagram of Kader Attia) with the label “Editions La Machine à rêves”: Comment perdre son accent de banlieue en 3 jours? (ironically entitled in both French and Arabic) and Comment rencontrer le musulman charmant? The designer clothing and accessories displayed in the machine and worn by the model bear a “Hallal” logo in French and Arabic. These are related to Attia’s work Hallal (2004), in which the artist transformed the Paris Left Bank Galerie Kamel Mennour into a mock clothing boutique. La Machine à rêves develops the theme of the search for integration and a new identity through the acquisition of brand names. This work signals the difficulties of balancing distinctive religious and secular cultures. The titles of the mock self-help books serve a ludic purpose, while simultaneously indicating that there is no quick and easy solution to the experience of identity conflict. The extremes contained within the mock Halal condoms, pill or string may amuse or offend, and at least surprise, the viewer, while they appear to point to the absurdity—and perhaps the inevitable failure—of the desperate attempt to retain a connection to one’s cultural roots in “Western” society. In its evocation, at least on one level, of an unrealizable dream of integration, La Machine à rêves is reminiscent of many—particularly earlier—novels exploring the Maghrebi diaspora in France. The use of humor to draw attention to the painful experience of identity conflict resonates particularly with Azouz Begag’s Beni ou le paradis privé (1989). In the original version of La Machine à rêves (2002-3) Attia had employed a male mannequin and an alternative selection of products for sale, including a kit for marriage to a French citizen, reminiscent of Beni’s pursuit of—and dreams of marriage to—a girl ironically named “France.” However, the “female” version of the installation contains, instead, a handbook on how to meet “un

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musulman charmant,” perhaps pointing to the tighter restrictions on women’s freedom within certain families of the Maghrebi diaspora.

Illustration 7-2. Kader Attia: La Machine à rêves, sculpture, courtesy, the artist and private collection, 2003

Moreover, the “clash” of value systems rendered both verbally and visually through the religious products promoting women’s sexual freedom appears to signal the particular difficulties endured by some women of immigrant descent.

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The pressures experienced by such women have frequently been the subject of literature in which expressions of the female protagonist’s sexuality are construed as a threat to the cultural cohesiveness that an authoritarian father, brother or mother strives to preserve (see, for example, Leïla Houari 1985, Ferrudja Kessas 1990, and Soraya Nini 1993). However, also reminiscent of such literature, discourses of alienation can be seen to co-exist with discourses of resistance. The installation indicates persistent attempts to essentialize and polarize “French” and “Maghrebi” communities—from both “host” and “immigrant” perspectives—while simultaneously reworking the clichés on which binary thinking depends. In this non-narrative form, the same disjunctive visual and verbal elements can give rise ambivalently to alternative possible readings. La Machine à rêves alludes to a possible discourse of alienation stemming from contrasting value systems in its juxtapositions of elements indicative of religious rituals and (especially) sexual freedom. However, it avoids the images of domestic violence, fugue or suicide that recur across many narratives focusing on daughters of immigrants. Moreover, the same signifiers can be interpreted as indicating not a loss of identity but diversely transnational identifications. Reminiscent of Correspondance, the simultaneous juxtaposition of the Halal products, including the Maggi Chorba, “fabriqué au Maroc,” which promises “Les saveurs d’une recette authentique du Maghreb,” the book on how to lose your “banlieue” accent in three days and the U.S. passport, combine allusions to national, local, regional and global cultural spaces. If La Machine à rêves appears somewhat pessimistic as to the acceptance of cultural—especially AraboIslamic—“difference” in France, it indicates the desire to be “transculturated”; that is, to be integrated without abandoning the parents’ Muslim culture while, moreover, maintaining affiliations to sub- and supranational spaces in a reciprocal, multidirectional process of exchange. Furthermore, Attia’s installation appears to go beyond a one-way critique; it can be seen to engage with, and contest, all at once, the exclusion of ethnic minorities, religious conservatism and consumer culture. This work communicates the replacement of religious devotion by the obsessive acquisition of brand names; however, the tone is derisive rather than nostalgic. Religion and consumer culture emerge as opposite extremes and alternative means of manipulation. Moreover, standing next to the towering mannequin as they too gaze at the objects in the vending machine, the spectator becomes conscious of their own potential position as the social “outsider,” as well as of their absorption by—but also, paradoxically, their perpetuation of—the consumer capitalist “machine.”

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(A similar multidirectional critique of alternative perceived extremisms and new “imperialisms”—including religious conservatism and consumer capitalism—emerges from the installations of Mounir Fatmi, the défiléperformances of Majida Khattari, and the graffiti of the anonymous artist “Princess Hijab.”) The use of ambivalent signifiers to evoke a multidirectional critique, and to trigger a plurality of possible “readings,” can be found in Ghost and Holy Land. However, these minimalist installations—which move beyond both the verbal (with the exception of the title) and the iconic visual—are even more allusive and, correspondingly, reliant on the unpredictable responses of the spectator.14 Ghost (2007) consists of a shimmering ensemble of multiple life-size veiled figures made of aluminium foil all facing in the same direction with their heads bowed as if in prayer.15 If forced to approach the installation from behind the figures, as presented at the Saatchi Gallery in 2007, it is not until we move around them that we realise they are empty moulds.16 This mass of fragile, disembodied shells is suggestive of human vulnerability and a loss of identity. Attia’s installation suggests the idea of social exclusion—particularly of minorities—and the, perhaps fruitless, search for an answer in religious devotion. However, his use of a disposable, everyday material appears to allude to consumerism as an equivalent form of (empty) refuge. Ghost is continuous with La Machine à rêves in what can be seen as its ambivalent critique of social marginalisation, religious conservatism and consumer capitalism, while it explores such themes in a transnational frame. Moreover, it alludes to a further global, ecological form of hegemony through the use of a nonbiodegradable material. In Ghost this multidirectional critique is evoked by conjoining a discrepant form and material.17 Furthermore, while both La Machine à rêves and Correspondance juxtapose, or alternate between, multiple visual and verbal languages, Ghost gives precedence to the gaps in discourse by exploring the void. Attia’s “embodiment” of the void, in Ghost, refers to those who usually remain unseen and unrepresented. The artist cites Fanon in his discussion of the existential void evoked by this installation: “those without shelter, without papers, without homes, without territories, without a homeland, without work, without the right to a space of speech” (cited in Durand 2010: 75). Ghost visualises a space for those without a voice. Attia’s fragile shapes, which record the contours of an absent body, reside between form and the non-form, connecting both states. Moreover, the moulded foil connects past and present in its simultaneous reference to

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the art-making process, through the traces it bears, and the spectator’s interaction with the work, via its reflective surface.

Illustration 7-3. Kader Attia: Ghost, sculpture, courtesy, the artist, Collection Centre George Pompidou, Paris, and private collection, 2008

While Ghost provides an example of renegotiating clichés of otherness in an uneven globalized frame, Holy Land employs a comparable aesthetic to treat the “unrepresentable” subject of clandestine immigration from the Maghreb to Europe.18 This installation provides a counterpoint to media images of tragic shipwrecks. Holy Land, as first exhibited along a stretch of beach on the island of Fuerteventura for the First Biennial of the Canary Islands in 2006, consists of 45 mirrors in the form of a pointed arch. Wedged into the earth, these pointed forms recall those of gravestones in North Africa. This work commemorates the death of the many harragas who drown in their illegal crossing while, in its use of an ambiguous form which is equally reminiscent of Islamic, Byzantine and Gothic architecture—combined with glass, which reflects the sea—it elicits contemplation of the wider geopolitical context in which such crossings continue to occur. (Like Ghost, interpretations of this work are dependent on the site at which it is exhibited.19) The title is suggestive of a pilgrimage, while the installation seems to imply that, for many in North Africa, the southward journey to Mecca has

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been replaced by that of northward immigration to Europe. The dreams of Muslim would-be immigrants have been reoriented; Europe, and the material wealth with which it is associated, is the new secular site of their desire.

Illustration 7-4. Kader Attia, Holy Land, sculpture, courtesy, the artist and private collection, 2007

This installation resonates with La Machine à rêves in its exploration of unrealizable dreams, and its ambiguous alignment of the spiritual and the economic, while it provokes such readings via the use of these simple, yet ambivalent, objects in a specific location. The shimmering mirrors call to mind the illusions harbored by immigrants to Europe, while their gravestone shape signals poignantly the myths on which their journeys and their lives depend. Moreover, the multiple, fragmented images of the land and sea reflected in each of the mirrors, which can be perceived as we approach them, evoke a shattering of illusions associated with the “Holy Land.” This work appears to point to the discrepancy between the image of Europe as an el dorado, encouraged by satellite television and the internet, and the idea of Europe as a fortress since the Schengen Agreement. It signals the deeper socio-economic divisions between cultures on either side of the Mediterranean that have resulted from the liberalization of trade within the EU, as well as signaling that the ease of

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circulation for some means exclusion and treacherous—often, tragic— attempted illegal border crossing for others. However, while the work highlights the tensions and unevenness between the two continents, it can be seen simultaneously to question real and imaginary boundaries by pointing to the endless process of exchange and reciprocity between cultures. Potential discourses of alienation and “difference” co-exist, as in other works, with those of resistance and transculturation. Positioned so that they all face outwards towards the sea, the mirrors reveal the inevitable interconnectedness of Europe and Africa. They evoke multiple intersecting perspectives and histories of travel in both directions, while they signal the omnipresence of the “other” culture regardless of geographical location. Moreover, while the pointed objects resemble gravestones, their form is also that used for doorways, windows and vaults. Both solid and seemingly hollow, both sculptural objects and the spaces in between, they appear to indicate rootedness but also passage and border crossing, and thus the porosity of cultural boundaries. In their shape these transcultural (Islamic / Gothic / Byzantine) objects point to convergences—due to the history of travel—between cultures in both continents. Moreover, the words “Holy Land” are perhaps more immediately evocative of Christian pilgrimages to Bethlehem. Reminiscent of Ghost, Attia’s exploration of religion and dreams of material wealth in this work go beyond the context of Muslim immigration. Furthermore, while these objects allude to sacred forms–including Islamic architecture, which has traditionally forbidden figuration–they are ironically also mirrors. As such, they evoke the obsession with appearance and artifice in secular cultures. Moreover, a tension emerges visually in this piece between the fabricated objects and the natural landscape, which can be seen to indicate human vanity and attempts to dominate nature (Galleria Continua 2010). Like Ghost, this work can be seen to signal a postcolonial “eco-critique.” Holy Land also converges with Ghost in its articulation of absence as a counterpoint to “over-exposed” images and its provision of a space in which alternative perspectives can be imagined; resistance occurs through formal means. In this installation, the void, or the “non-form,” specifically resists architectural languages, which have long been seen as visual embodiments of authority and the sacred in both Muslim and Christian cultures. The use of glass can be seen to desacralize the pointed architectural form by introducing a signifier of the secular, while it also visualises the space surrounding form, thereby allowing for contingency and diversity. The images reflected shift ceaselessly in ways that depend on organic phenomena—the evolving light and changing weather—and the unpredictable movement of the spectators. This fluid, contingent space

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both exceeds and disrupts the organizing principles of visual, architectural language. In Holy Land, and in Ghost, Attia employs a form that alludes to iconic images or dominant visual languages, while he combines this with a material that connects presence and absence, form, and its other. Moreover, the reflective qualities of glass and (albeit to a lesser extent) molded foil interpolate and implicate the spectator, not only intellectually but also physically and visually. In his preoccupation with things and their opposites Attia is influenced by Foucault and Duchamp (Attia, cited in Durand 2010: 76). Indeed, his works reveal a striking resonance with Duchamp’s investigations of the infra-mince (the infra-thin); that is, the almost imperceptible difference between two things or ideas; for example, “Fire without smoke, the warmth of a seat which has just been left, reflection from a mirror or glass, watered silk, iridescent, the people who go through [subway gates] at the very last moment, velvet trousers, their whistling sound, is an infra-thin separation signaled” (Duchamp 1945: 45). However, in Ghost and Holy Land, Attia’s visualization of the invisible evokes the existential void, to which he alludes through his citation of Fanon. These minimalist aesthetics resonate as much with the enduring theory, and certain material practices, of the infra-thin as with the postcolonial imperative to forge a means for the “subaltern” to speak.

Conclusion Attia’s work exploring the themes of immigration and “difference” is indicative of the specificity and diversity of postcolonial visual languages. These installations, while reminiscent of certain literary works, reveal distinctively visual—indeed, multisensorial—means of communicating the ambivalent dynamics of postcolonial contact zones. Correspondance reappropriates video and photography to juxtapose, or superimpose, images and sounds indicative of alternative cultural spaces and historical moments in ways that demonstrate interconnectedness and transcultural interplay. In this work the topos of the southward journey is renegotiated through the vertical accretion and mise-en-abyme of concentric “spatio-temporal” layers to demonstrate both the transnational complexity of “home” and the radical diversity of “Algeria.” La Machine à rêves depends on the viewer’s alternate privileging of multiple potential discourses—Islam and consumerism, alienation and integration, assimilation and transculturation— which are suggested simultaneously by ambivalent visual and verbal signifiers. The viewer’s role in the contrapuntal process is increasingly emphatic as the aesthetics become more minimalist, corresponding to a

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diminishing of the artist’s control. Ghost and Holy Land trigger such a multiperspectival viewing process in their conjunction of a discrepant form and material, as well as an allusive title and shifting location, as the installation is recreated in new cultural and curatorial contexts. Each of these works differs in terms of its subject matter and the multisensorial experience that it promotes. However, these installations converge in their promotion of a way of seeing that allows for multiple— including “unrepresented” and “unrepresentable”—perspectives. In such works visual clichés surrounding immigration and “difference” become signifiers of Opacity and triggers for a transcultural exchange.20 Each work can be seen to reinvent an artistic language that both alludes to a visual, cultural referent, or system of signs, while simultaneously exceeding it by achieving a balance between presence and absence, politics and poetics, the semiotic and the sensorial, control and contingency. Indeed, these works of art both illuminate and move beyond “Francophone” frames and, moreover, “postcolonial” studies.

Notes 1

Attention has additionally been given–albeit more rarely–to bande dessinée, music and comedy. Work in visual studies has, since the 1990s, approached art from a postcolonial perspective, though its objects of enquiry emerge primarily from contexts other than the Francophone. 2 Zineb Sedira comments explicitly on the importance, for her, of avoiding both exoticism and politics in her work on Algeria (2006: 60). 3 My analysis has focused primarily on the two interconnected corpora of artwork exploring a Franco-Maghrebi space, outlined above (Shilton 2013a). 4 Fernando Ortiz uses the term “transculturation” to distinguish the immigrant experience from the hierarchical, “one-way” process suggested by “acculturation”: Ortiz: 1947, x-xi. More recent reinterpretations of transculturation can be found in the work of Silvia Spitta, Felipe Hernández and Alicia Arrizón. 5 “Double critique” was first written as two separate parts in 1970 and 1974. 6 “dans une pensée autre qui parle en langues, se mettant à l’écoute de toute parole–d’où qu’elle vienne”; emphasis in original. All translations are my own, unless otherwise stated. 7 On the specificities of installation art see, for example, Claire Bishop (2005), Nick Kaye (2000 and 2007) and Julie Reiss (1999). 8 Correspondance is exhibited in the permanent collection at the Musée national de l’histoire et des cultures de l’immigration, Paris. , December 2013. 9 “Dans toute separation un lien perdure par le biais de photos echangées, de films vidéo. Ceci est mon album de famille, et pourrait être celui de beaucoup d’autres.” 10 A comparable combination of belly dancing and the everyday can be found in Kameli’s Bledi, a possible scenario (2004).

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My use of the term ‘transmedial’ to describe art that demonstrates transcultural processes on a formal and sensorial level is distinct from its conventional employment to refer to ‘the appearance of a certain motif, aesthetic, or discourse across a variety of media’ (Rajewsky 2005: 46). 12 Critics have highlighted the importance of the ‘space between the screens’ in installation art. See, for example, Liz Kotz (2005 [1996]) and Margaret Morse (1990). 13 I interpret La Machine à rêves as presented in the exhibition ‘J’ai deux amours’ at the Musée national de l’histoire et des cultures de l’immigration, Paris (20112012), , December 2013. 14 In my analysis of Ghost and Holy Land, I rely on video footage, as well as photographs and texts (see especially Régis Durand, 2010 and Amanda Crawley Jackson, 2011). I interpret these works (necessary for a full account of Attia’s treatment of Franco-Maghrebi crossings) with an awareness that they have been “translated” through the media of video and photography, in which the visual is given more importance and the viewpoint is controlled by features such as framing and camera angle. The physical experience of these works can only be imagined through such media, while a fuller knowledge of their potential effects can be gained by considering documentation that records diverse experiences within and between contrasting spatial and cultural environments. 15 See the video footage: , December 2013. 16 See the photographs of diverse perspectives of the installation as exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery: , December 2013. 17 I make this point, regarding the multidirectional critique that can be seen to emerge from Ghost, in relation to my analysis of work in video, sculpture and installation art by Mounir Fatmi (Shilton 2013b). 18 , December 2013. 19 When installed in Saint Tropez, as part of the exhibition ‘Dialogues Méditerranéens’ (2007), this work would have drawn particular attention to the geopolitical space of the Mediterranean. Shown subsequently in the very different context of the Galleria Continua’s garden (San Gimignano, 2010), 21 of the mirrors reflected the Tuscan countryside and the sky, “transforming the space,” as the accompanying press release tells us, “into an ‘ephemeral architecture’, into a place that invites us to dwell upon memory and history.” The text refers to the original exhibition of the work on the beach of Fuerteventura, while it highlights its status as “‘a reflection […] on the real desire to immigrate’” (citing Attia) and its mirroring of “the image of a globalized world that has lost its cultural identity.” Exhibited in this location, Holy Land could, presumably, have also encouraged consideration of Italy’s history of immigration and relations with cultures beyond its geographical boundaries. 20 I am using the term Opacity (Opacité) in Edouard Glissant’s sense, to refer to irreducible “otherness” in which the “self” is implicated (1990: 203-9).

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References Arrizón, Alicia. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate Publishing, 2005 Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Crawley Jackson, Amanda. “(Re)Appropriations: Architecture and Modernity in the Work of Kader Attia,” Modern and Contemporary France (19, 2). 2011, 163-177. Cronin, Michael. Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation. Cork: Cork University Press, 2000. Duchamp, Marcel. View (special issue), March 1945. Durand, Régis. Kader Attia in conversation with Régis Durand, in NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art (26, Spring), 2010, 70-79. Dyer, Richard, Z. Sedira, C. Van Assche and E. Zabunyan, Zineb Sedira. Saphir. London: The Photographers’ Gallery; Paris: Kamel Mennour and Paris Musées, 2006. Fisher, Jean. The Syncretic Turn. Cross-cultural Practices in the Age of Multiculturalism, in Z. Kocur and S. Leung (eds), pp. 233-41. Glissant, Edouard. Poétique de la relation. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Hall, Doug and S. J. Fifer (eds). Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. New York, Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition; London, distributed by Hale, 1990. Hernández, Felipe, M. Millington and I. Borden (eds). Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Houari, Leïla. Zeida de nulle part. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985. Kaye, Nick. Multi-media: Video, Installation, Performance. New York: Routledge, 2007 Kaye, Nick. Site-specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London: Routledge, 2000. Kessas, Ferrudja. Beur’s Story. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990. Khatibi, Abdelkabir. Maghreb pluriel. Paris: Denoël, 1983. Kocur, Zoya and S. Leung (eds). Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005 [first published 1996]. Kotz, Liz. Video Projection: the Space between Screens, in Z. Kocur and S. Leung (eds), pp. 101–15. Morse, Margaret. Video Installation Art: the Body, the Image and the Space-in-Between’, in D. Hall, and S. J. Fifer (eds), pp. 153–67.

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Nini, Soraya. Ils disent que je suis une beurette… Paris: Fixot, 1993. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint. New York: Knopf, 1947. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Rajewsky, Irina. Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality, in Intermédialités (6, Autumn) 2005, 43-64. Reiss, Julie. From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994 [First published 1993]. Sedira, Zineb. Zineb Sedira, in conversation with Christine Van Assche, in R. Dyer et al., p. 56-63. Shilton, Siobhán. Transcultural Encounters: Gender and Genre in Franco-Maghrebi Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013a. Shilton, Siobhán. Cubist Counterpoint: Transnational Aesthetics in Video, Sculpture and Installation Art by Mounir Fatmi, in Forum for Modern Language Studies (2013b; first published online 19 June 2013; doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqt025) Silverstein, Paul. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Spitta, Silvia. Between Two Waters: Literary Transculturation in Latin America. Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1995. Galleria Continua, press release. Kader Attia Holy Land. San Gimignano, Italy, 2010.

PART IV: FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN IDENTITIES BETWEEN NOVELTY AND TRADITION

CHAPTER EIGHT SKY-BIRDS AND DEAD TREES: EDMOND JABÈS AND IMRU’ AL-QAYS YASSER ELHARIRY DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

In many ways, Edmond Jabès (Cairo, 1912-Paris, 1991) needs no introduction: he is the celebrated author of the seven-tome Le livre des questions cycle (1963-1973); his readers have included Gabriel Bounoure, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and Emmanuel Levinas; he counted Max Jacob, Paul Éluard, René Char, and Michel Leiris among his friends… Yet Jabès’s illustrious career in France forms only half of the story. He spent his entire life until 1956 in his native Egypt, producing a body of work that sat uneasily with both the author and his critics. First collected in 1957 and published by Gallimard as Je bâtis ma demeure : poèmes 1943-1957, reissued in 1959 with a preface by Gabriel Bounoure and an afterword by Joseph Guglielmi, then finally reprinted with additional texts in Le seuil le sable : poésies complètes, 1943-1988, Jabès’s formative Cairene period and his literary production during that time have long remained understudied, in large part due to their ambiguity in relation to his œuvre, as well as to the sense of literary and biographical uneasiness that they convey. Unlike his Parisian texts, none of which were revised or reedited once published, Jabès never quite succeeded in coming to terms with his Egyptian work. While some of the more recent scholarship on Jabès has shed extensive light on the poet’s biography and the editorial history of his literary work in Egypt, there remains one aspect that has only been given scant attention by the critics.1 In her recollections of the poet, Jabès’s English translator and close friend Rosmarie Waldrop relates how reading certain Arabic works may have helped her first translations of Le livre des questions: If I had known more at the time I would have consulted Arabic works in the “divan” form, like The Wedding Nights of Abd al-Rahmane al-Soyoûti,

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which have a similar structure of guests assembling on various occasions to tell stories, argue, quote and discuss poems and philosophers. (Waldrop 2000: 56)

Waldrop is referring to Jabès’s structural récit éclaté aesthetic, which, while already present in some of the work from his Cairene period, he elaborates and begins to prominently feature in his œuvre starting with Le livre des questions. A style that would characterize the entirety of his subsequent work, Jabès’s shattered narratives are characterized by a subversion of logical links, by the collecting and sewing together of short forms (formulæ, aphorisms, quotations, anecdotes), by an affinity for the dialogical, and by an intertextuality that weaves rabbinic traditions with wisdom literature. Waldrop then goes on to explain Jabès’s relationship to Middle Eastern literatures: Jabès actually read both Kabbalah and Arabic literature fairly late in his life. “Well after the first volumes of The Books of Questions,” he tells Jason Weiss. After people had remarked on his relation to these works, “as if wanting to check the intuition I had regarding a certain Judaism.” It is clearly not the letter of those texts that marked me, but the shape of the thinking [moule de pensée], their spiritual depth, their so particular logic… In the early years of my knowing him Edmond seemed reluctant to acknowledge that these traditions stand behind his work. Speaking of rabbis he even put in a book: “But he owes them nothing.” What gall! He owes them lots. But it is true that he does not owe them his work, this extraordinary fusion of traditions from East and West that defies classification as well as direct literary filiation. To the point where, as Marcel Cohen has said, “they seem to try to go back to a space before literature, where the idea is still prisoner of its mother-lode (gangue).” (Waldrop 2000: 56)

While commentators have studied in depth the circulation of Jewish thought and intellectual traditions in Jabès’s texts—this extensive body of important scholarship bears the heavy mark of Derridean and Blanchotian readings of Jabès—there are no studies of the subtler, even marginal traces of Arabic literature in his work.2 Even though Waldrop suggests that the Arabic inflection of Jabès’s texts occurs “fairly late in his life,” there is earlier, explicit evidence of his fascination with classical Arabic literature. To be sure, they started out as traces and vague suggestions, and continued to be so throughout his œuvre. When questioned in September 1982 by Jason Weiss, “Did Arab culture enter into your education?” Jabès responds:

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Jabès’s comments here are wrought with complexities, from his gloss of orientalism and the dichotomy of East and West to his pastoral divisions of country and city, his stereotypes of international peasantry, and his recollection and portrayal of cosmopolitan expatriation in Egypt. Revealingly, however, this platitudinous dimension in Jabès takes its cue from a certain Middle Eastern tradition of orality, where ideas, verses, and quotations circulate freely, disembodied from their originary sources. Indeed, by this late stage in his career, the platitudinous and the commonplace had become a marking feature of Jabès’s books.3 The oral circulation of Arabic verse and the aural quality of that poetry had fascinated Jabès since the very outset of his literary itinerary. In Cairo, around 1932, a young Jabès had written a short essay entitled “Apport à la poésie: le logisme,” published in the political and cultural review, La Semaine égyptienne, edited in Cairo. In it, he comments:

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Still quite young, scrutinizing them in my history book where they were reproduced photographically, I dreamed of these poems on papyrus that the ancient poets of Arabia exhibited on the walls of the Kaaba, so that the chiefs of tribes and the savants of all the lands, having come in pilgrimage, could take them away and sing them and disseminate them in their tents. The poem thus offered to the eyes of the foreigner, if he did not transform it back home after having read it, or, more frequently, having only heard it, he at the very least situated it in an atmosphere suitable to his temperament. The long cry of the poet amplified itself from one mouth to another mouth, each one retaining of it, one or two verses that characterized it in general, and, true miracle of poetry, constructed out of the selected and modified strophe, a suggested poem (quoted by Jaron 2000: 18-19; emphasis added).4

Jabès is not alone in being compelled by the disembodied abstraction of verse and of poetic suggestion. His early cultural milieu in Cairo had provided him with a “sonic foundation” and an “inexhaustible reservoir […] both linguistic and affective” that cut across class or literacy lines. As his contemporary and one-time literary collaborator Georges Henein observes in his discussion of the Arabic-speaking world’s relationship to the great Egyptian poet laureate Ahmed Shawqi: The miracle of Shawqi is that he immediately knew, as if by some forgotten trigger, to reintroduce movement into a language that had become static, to nuance to the extreme its expression of sentiment, to meld grace with gravity in a style wherein everyone saluted the blooming of his own hitherto silent personality. And, in fact, beyond the boundaries of Egypt, all of Lebanon, Syria, and a part of Iraq chant in chorus Shawqi’s poems, to the point that they have ended up forming a sonic foundation, an inexhaustible reservoir that was both linguistic and affective. It is not rare, even today, for anyone who circulates between Beirut, Damascus and Aleppo, to stop along the road, to enter a humble peasant’s home and to hear a few fragments of the Shawqiyates [Shawqi’s collected works] (Henein 2006: 726; emphasis added).5

The recurrent preoccupation with the Eastern peasant reveals a level of linguistic and cultural awareness common to many of the region’s inhabitants. Like Jabès’s early fascination with jahili poetry, the overbearing suggestion of the (pre)existence of poetry was something that, as early as 1926, the Egyptian modernist Taha Hussein had already critiqued at length in Fi al-sh‘ir al-jahili (On Jahili Poetry). Hussein’s reading of pre-Islamic poetry launched a polemic that culminated in the loss of his post at Cairo University, and it is difficult to imagine any contemporaneous Egyptian writers—including Jabès—

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immersed in and surrounded by the controversy of Fi al-sh‘ir al-jahili, who might have remained unaware of or ignorant of the literary stakes in question, regardless of the language in which they chose to write. Hussein’s pithy remarks on the structuring prevalence of jahili poetry in the minds of present-day Egyptians elucidate the allure of the pre-Islamic “suggested poem” for Jabès, even though Hussein harshly condemns the old-fashionedness of such a reception of jahili poetry: And you [the reader] should not be deceived by modernist coinage in literary criticism, nor by this fanciful tendency to divide literary history into periods and to impart to it some element of order and coherency; for this is all a preoccupation with surface layers and shapes, and it in no way nears the threshold nor the heart of the matter. For the Arabs are still divided between the ephemeral and the eternal [the nomadic and the settled], and between the rooted and the derivative [the indigenous and the foreign]. And those here are still from Jurhum, and those there descendants of Isma‘il. And Imru’ al-Qays is still the poet of “Stop, let us both weep…,” and Tarafa the poet of “A young gazelle there…,” and ‘Amr Ibn Kulthum the poet of “Ha girl!...,” and jahili and Islamic debates alike remain divided between verse and prose. (Hussein 2010: 4)

This passage from Hussein operates on several levels. First of all, it is a concerted, sarcastic attack on ansar al-qadim, or the “proponents of the old [mode of literary criticism and scholarship].” He depicts them as continuing to exist in a medieval Arab world of identitarian geographic demarcations (ba’ida wa baqiya, or “the nomadic [tribes] and the settled [civilizations]”), hagiographic origins and descendence (‘ariba wa musta‘raba, or “the indigenous [Arab tribes] and the foreign [settlers]”), and archetypal tribal divisions (amongst them Jurhum, Isma‘il, and others). But Hussein’s sarcasm also reveals ansar al-qadim as dominating critical discourses on literary Jahiliyya, with their constant, clichéd references to the opening verses of the most famous pieces of pre-Islamic Arabic literature, the mu‘allaqat (sing. mu‘allaqah) or the suspended qasa’id (sing. qasidah, ode), so called because they were purportedly hung “on the walls of the Kaaba,” as Jabès writes. However, a closer reading of one of these poems’ other verses, in particular Imru’ al-Qays’s mu‘allaqah, reveals its thematic and structural importance for Jabès’s final works published during his lifetime. Bringing together the multifaceted aspects of his extended writing career, Jabès’s final works are not only a throwback to his youthful fascination with the mu‘allaqat, they also corroborate Waldrop’s statements that Jabès had rediscovered these texts later in his life.

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The poet’s early fascination and late re-discovery of Arabic literature re-erupt in two of his later texts, Un étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (1989, henceforth Un étranger) and Le livre de l’hospitalité (1991). Dense, enigmatic texts that are emblematic of Jabès’s late style, they revolve around such centrifugal themes as foreignness, estrangement, hospitality, immigration, and transnationalism. Un étranger recounts a series of conversations and dialogues between two individuals seated on the terrace of a Parisian café around Saint-Germain, with a third and nameless individual somewhere in the distance. As they discuss him and as the book progresses, it transpires that this third-person in question is not purely a stranger, but a close, though estranged, acquaintance. At last, they have a fleeting interaction with him. Formalistically, the remainder of the text interweaves in a paratactic manner these episodes of the shattered narrative with a numbered poem (Pages du livre exhumé), dense aphorisms, and an ongoing reflection on what Derrida, in Of Hospitality, calls the “foreigner question.” Jabès’s follow-up book, Le livre de l’hospitalité, raises related questions of foreignness, hospitality and responsibility, and does so in the same fragmented fashion. However, it marks an inward turn on the poet’s part as it discusses personal, political engagements rarely encountered with such explicitness in his writing (even the very word “Auschwitz” makes an extraordinarily tardy appearance in Jabès’s work, appearing for the first time in Un étranger). The base narrative of Le livre de l’hospitalité, recounted in the third-person, revolves around the poet’s composition of a response to the contemporary scandal of the desecration of the Jewish cemetery at Carpentras. The piece was published in the French daily Libération, and is in fact quoted and reinserted in its entirety back into the body of the work, under a section entitled “Un jour de vie.” Rounding out the narrative structure of Le livre de l’hospitalité are intermittent but related “entretiens” with editors, old friends re-summoned, resurrected and nostalgically reimagined, and faceless, nameless, perhaps even hostile, hosts. Once again, this is layered against a numbered poem (Arc-en-ciel, with a recurrent poetic imagery of the sky and the bird), questions and aphoristic responses pertaining to the book’s central theme of hospitality. Derrida’s axiomatic assertions in Le monolinguisme de l’autre (1996)—“We only ever speak one language” and “We never speak only one language”—condense the linguistic and theoretical stakes of reading Jabès’s late texts alongside al-Qays’s mu‘allaqah: When Jabès adopts similar themes and imagery, in what language is he writing? In what space is he writing? What space is he writing? Such questions give rise to another series of questions: What are the theoretical limits of a term such

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as “francophonie”? Are there limits to it? What is its threshold point? How hospitable is it to other languages and literary traditions? In Le livre de l’hospitalité, Jabès proposes at the very outset of his book one possible means of broaching these questions, espousing the ideals of generosity and responsibility dramatized by a relationship of textual hospitality between two foreign texts. At the threshold of his book, in a sub-subsection entitled “Un nouveau seuil,” Jabès writes: He watched the universe flow [jaillir] from the abyss only to sink back again, preoccupied with its own disappearance. As man, with death. O this void, this void that nothing troubles. A new threshold? —A glance, turned elsewhere; the brusque revision of a trajectory [parcours]. (Jabès 1991: 15)6

This is followed by a reflection on words and farewells, and their textual emplacement within “the hospitality of the white page” (from the prière d’insérer). Jabès’s invitation to read his œuvre or his “trajectory” in a “brusquely revised” fashion encourages the exploration of a new “elsewhere,” setting the course for a new “parcours” to be navigated and discovered. His delicate positioning of all of this at a new threshold (“un nouveau seuil ?”)—the point from which the poet writes, waits, and meanders—allows the reader to dwell, paradoxically, on the necessity of movement and of exchange between different texts, languages and traditions. This exchange, a form of generous hospitality, bespeaks Jabès’s native Cairo and his original, distant interests in Arabic literature. In revising Jabès’s “parcours” all the way back to the 6th century CE, and in particular to the final twelve verses of al-Qays’s mu‘allaqah, a new poetic universe appears to erupt or “jaillir” from Jabès’s textual “abyss.” Deploying precise, impeccable semantics, al-Qays describes the sublimity of a desert rainstorm. His landscape culminates with the depiction of the movement and grotesque aftermath of dead animals, deformed like the sick, ugly, upturned roots of desert plants: My friend, can you see lightning? Let me point out to you its flashes in the distance gleaming like the flash of hands [as it moves swiftly] in a mass of cloud piled up like a crown Its light giving illumination, or like the lamps of a hermit who has been generous with oil on the twisted wicks I sat watching it with my companions between Darij and al-‘Udhayb, and how far did I [have to] gaze

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As far as we could tell the right hand of its downpour rose over Qatan and its left over al-Sitar and Yadhbul It began shedding its load of rain around Kutayfa, flattening the kanahbul trees to the ground Then some of its spray passed over al-Qanan and drove down from there the white-footed ibex from every place where they were resting At Tayma’ it did not leave [standing] the trunk of a single palm nor any large building except [one] built of stone In the onslaught of its deluge Thabir was like an elder of the people wrapped up in a striped cloak In the morning the top of the peaks of al-Mujaymir was like the whirl of a spindle from the torrent and the debris [swirling round them] It had cast the water it contained on to the expanse of al-Ghabit, as a Yemeni merchant bringing bags of cloth for sale dumps them on the ground In the morning the finches of the valleys had been given drink of the finest wine—wine fiery as pepper—[so noisy were they] In the evening the beasts of prey were [lying] there drowned in its furthest reaches like bulbous plants uprooted [and twisted into unreal shapes] (quoted and translated by Jones 1996: 81-86).

Heavily dependent on the simile for rhetorical effect, these closing verses are preceded by several distinct passages or “movements” in the poem: it begins with a section called the nasib in which the poet bemoans the traces of the departed beloved’s encampment; then it moves into several long sections of reminiscence and a fakhr in which the poet boasts of previous loves, beauties, and of grandiose shows of generosity; an “experience” section follows next, describing the night, a wolf, a horse, and a chase and its aftermath; and finally, there is the passage quoted above. The decadent, decaying imagery of the final verses informs similar poetic depictions and devices in late, hospitable Jabès, including themes and images (the desert and its fauna), and simile and metaphor. In the two books under consideration, Jabès himself makes special use of two antithetical poetic figures, namely the bird (symbolizing the open skyspace and the poet) and the tree (symbolizing, ironically, the desert). Both figures draw on conventionalized tropes of jahili poetry, such as those used by Imru’ al-Qays and other odists, in which they come to identify with desert fauna. The exergue placed at the threshold of Le livre de l’hospitalité, for instance, treats in a complex poetic prose the poet’s estranged relationship to word and world, replete with an implicit questioning of such a state. The metaphoric figure of the bird presented (here an eagle) becomes, metonymically, the sky:

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From “writing” to “knowing” and from “confirming” to “reigning,” the verbal ontology of the text is punctuated with the compound past tense, as if the suspended, inanimate timelessness of writing, knowledge, confirmation and reigning were but a front for the very dead, desertic backdrop of “I ceased to exist,” of “all […] became blue,” of the oxymoronic vacuous plenitude and pluridimensionality of the poet’s writing consciousness (“all, above and around me,” “immense empty expanse,” “to infinity,” “the space of my life and of the book,” “to reign as master”). All the same, life exists amongst this verbal and ontological stilllife, for at the heart of the first two strophes—an internally arrhythmic cæsura marked by an affirmative “Yes”—are the beating, fluttering wings of the eagle that end the first strophe. This is followed in the second strophe by the hopefulness of a search (suspended and cushioned by the two verbs in the imperfect, “was seeking” and “was trying”) and of a birth (“that which […] was seeking […] to be born and that I was trying to express”). The as yet unborn poem takes on the form of a bird— significantly, a bird of prey—in flight, both dead and alive, the two strophes metonymically fluttering their wings, rapacious and suspended in wait for the book-poem to come forth. The sky-bird (the eagle) makes a remarkable reappearance in the fourth section of the text, L’hospitalité nomade, in which Jabès recounts a personal, biographical anecdote that involved a traversal of the Sinai desert into Lebanon with his early friend Jean Moscatelli (the anthologist of Poètes en Egypte). They undertake a crossing of the Sinai desert into a Levant that they had intended to explore “like a very ancient and just recent book” (Hospitalité 81). Jabès depicts a desert landscape in which misadventure is inevitable, for the car becomes stuck, suspended in a dune, and the two friends find themselves face-to-face with the immensity of the desert and the desert sky: —I remember. The sun passed through our skin. […] The sky had the transparence of the glass that a haughty eagle seemed to want to stripe with its talons, then shatter pitilessly. At night, we would

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have seen the shards of glass metamorphose into diamonds: “… like dwarf moons,” you were saying. But no. The eagle, manifestly, disdained us. (Jabès 1991: 82-83)8

The two companions are, however, rescued by a passing, ghostly, nomad: “Around midnight, a voice, grave, powerful, surging from the depth of the night, nailed us in place. A nomad […] A phantom” (Jabès 1991: 84). This spectral desert dweller, this phantom with the harrowing voice and no name, then offers immeasurable, generous and unquestioning hospitality upon leading the nameless reminiscers to his encampment. But the reappearance of the eagle and the progressive introduction of wild desert fauna (in turn reminiscent of many a passage of jahili poetry), at this moment in the text, attain a heightened musicality that, alongside the stranded confrontation with the unforgiving desert sky, recalls the precariousness of the bird-poet at the opening of the book: We were hearing scream, in the distance, the red kites. We were following them in their flight and precipitated escape. Around, vultures rummaged the space, encouraged—we would have said—by the solitary hyena whose howl, the first time, startled us. She was so close to us and we had not noticed. (Jabès 1991: 83)9

The poetic metamorphosis of the sky, from the very first page of the book to its present state is remarkable for several reasons. With all the threatening hostility of Nature and Desert, with all their Music and their Birds of Prey, this poetic universe takes in the poet-as-bird, against a backdrop of suspended dunes and sands, both rooted and eternal, and ever shifting. The exergue, on the other hand, had depicted the sky as a “blue, immense empty expanse for the flight of the eagle,” where color, blueness, immensity, vastness and emptiness were juxtaposed and were almost welcoming of the eagle’s flight, where the distinguishing characteristics of the bird were its lachrymose “powerful wings,” which, “in flapping, repeat to infinity the gestures of the farewell to the world.” So what can be made of the shift away from the metaphorical vacuum of sky-space in the book’s opening towards its present state of glasslike fragility? From its sun-scorched, desert-like austerity to its sparkling diamond-like nocturnal state of dwarf moons? Or, for that matter, what can be made of the eagle, no longer fluttering, sad and dying, but proud, haughty, stealthily armed, pitiless? With all this, when all is said and done, in a sustained extension of a poetics of suspension, no bird of prey swoops down from the sky, no vultures or scavenger mammals pounce into action, no casualties are inflicted, but rather a kind-faced nomad comes to the

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rescue. The airy suspension of the wildness (the distant scream of the kites, the soaring of the vultures, the single hyena’s lonely howl) is “tout près” yet somehow imperceptible. Echoes of al-Qays’s jahili poetics, also, are “tout près” yet somehow imperceptible. Jabès’s poetry counters the suspended imagery of the sky-bird with the arborescent associations of the tree. The circularity of the dialogue and the precariousness of the poet-as-bird starkly oppose the fixity of poet-as-tree, hinted at by the employing of the verb “clouer,” as when “a voice […] nailed us in place.” Having been employed to dizzying effect in Un étranger, the verb connotes immobility, almost violently so in its active voicing. But when used nominally—as in the verse, “In a flash, eternity produces a rust red [rubigineux] nail, as, of the rash minute, it makes a useless hammer”10 (Jabès 1989: 11)—the rusty eternity of the rapport is a fixing (“clou,” “marteau”) in place and time (“éclair,” “éternité,” “minute”), a fixing marked by brown-red elements and the oxidizing passage of time. Jabès appears to be implicitly critiquing whatever origins or roots of fixity there may have been, for to attach with a nail is to alter an otherwise and previously unfixed object, just like the mu‘allaqat. There is a movement in Jabès’s work away from rootedness, though somehow the figure of the tree and its offshoots (“tronc” and “sol,” for example) come to best express such a movement, since “for the uprooted, the tree is an element of the landscape that does not captivate him” (Jabès 1989: 33). The complicit deployment of both images (sky-bird and tree) enacts the unease and precariousness of the poet. Towards the end of Un étranger, Jabès inflects his forest-like poetics onto une étrangeté (foreignness, strangeness) that comes to resemble fraternity, and the unnamed wandering bird represented by the third-person and thematized throughout his texts becomes a sick, upturned tree, a sleeper in the valley struck by a lightning bolt to the heart: And as I was pressing him to give me a definition of fraternity, he replied to me: “In the obscure forest where we crossed each other, fraternity is, maybe, the imperceptible auroral rustle that, from one end to another, traverses it and makes it shiver.” Leaning towards the ground, like a sick tree, struck through the heart by lightning, the body deformed by the hump, so heavily loaded, disgraceful burden of flesh and bone, who is he, today and what does he hope? He was saying: “Create, love growing wings for you but, one day, we will perceive that, for having ceased to flap for so long, they no longer form, layered one over the other, but a hump of which we cannot undo ourselves.”

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And he added: “Is it not curious that wings be the appanage of the back, as if, clairvoyant, they seek, in advance, to shield from sight their inexorable degeneration? (Jabès 1989: 123; emphasis added).11

A throwback to the very different and much older “sick tree” of Imru’ al-Qays’s mu‘allaqah, what does a superficial thematic resemblance between two unrelated poets say about language, and about the language of francophone poetic expression? With Jabès and his native Cairo, what were the significance and contribution of the multilingualism of an otherwise predominantly arabophone society, or of the circulation and creolization of languages, tongues, and ears, of texts, images, and verses? The contention that the francophone veneer of Jabès’s “sick tree” foils al-Qays’s twisted plant roots draws on Derrida’s theory of the bi-langue, which he pursues in the direction of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Du bilinguisme (Derrida 1996: 22), and especially of the hybrid textual form of Jabès’s dialogic compositions. Like Le livre de l’hospitalité, Derrida’s Le monolinguisme de l’autre is composed around a series of dialogues and discussions; like Jabès, Derrida questions not only identity politics and linguistic theory, but also notions of interlingual hospitality. With his axioms asserted, Derrida problematizes any succinct divisions between mono-, bi- and pluri-lingualism, and in exploring what it means to be monolingue, he arrives at the following conclusion: Let us sum up. The monolingual of whom I speak speaks a language of which he is deprived. The French language is not his. Because he is therefore deprived of all languages, and no longer has any other recourse—neither Arabic, nor Berber, nor Hebrew, nor any languages his ancestors would have spoken—because this monolingual is in a certain way aphasic (maybe he writes because he is an aphasic), he is thrown into absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference, without an originary language, and without a source language [langue de départ]. For him, there are only target languages [langues d’arrivée], if you will, the remarkable experience being, however, that these languages just cannot manage to reach themselves because they no longer know where they are coming from, what they are speaking from and what the sense of their journey is. Languages without an itinerary and, above all, without any superhighway of, goodness knows, what information (Derrida 1998: 6062; translated by Patrick Mensah).12

Jabès’s “monolingualism,” his arabophone “aphasia,” and his “absolute translation” of an otherwise non-extant original source elucidate his early ascription of the mu‘allaqah as a “suggested poem”—poems that were at origin oral, then inked on papyrus and suspended on the Kaaba, and finally

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disembodied and disseminated across caravan trails before coming down to Hussein’s ansar al-qadim. With only traces and no origins, by the time these verses had made their way into Jabès’s “French,” “monolingual” Jabès had been seeking a lifetime of refuge in a single foreign language that haunted him all the way through to his final days and his final book: —What do you come to do in my country? —Of all countries, yours is most dear to me. —Your attachment to my homeland does not justify your permanent presence amongst us. —Of what do you reproach me? —Foreigner, you will be, always, to me a foreigner. Your place is your home and not here. —Your country is that of my language. (Jabès 1991: 51)13

Notes 1

These include Daniel Lançon’s Jabès l’Égyptien (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1998); Entre Nil et sable : écrivains d’Égypte d’expression française (1920-1960) (Paris: CNDP, 1999), edited by Marc Kober et al.; Steven Jaron’s edited volume, Portrait(s) d’Edmond Jabès (Paris: BnF, 2000), as well as his monograph, Edmond Jabès: The Hazard of Exile (Oxford: Legenda, 2003). For a reading of the compositional and editorial history of Je bâtis ma demeure in Paris, and for a brief consideration of the thematic and structural (dis)unity of the collection, cf. Irène Langlet’s “Recueil de recueils: l’exemple d’Edmond Jabès,” in Le recueil poétique (special issue of Méthode! 2 (2002: 65-71). 2 Jabès’s earliest and most important readers were Gabriel Bounoure, in his 1959 preface to Je bâtis ma demeure, later collected with other essays, notes and some correspondence in Edmond Jabès : le demeure et le livre (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1984); Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès ou la question du livre” and “Ellipse,” in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Maurice Blanchot, “Traces,” in L’amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); and Emmanuel Levinas, “Edmond Jabès aujourd’hui,” in Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976). The very first important piece of critical writing on Jabès, Bounoure’s preface, outlines Jabès’s early relationship to verse: “La poésie, telle qu’il la comprend, est un langage qui hante la fondrière des éléments, la pensée des feuilles, la douleur des coquillages pour finalement tout « haler » sur le rivage anthropomorphique. La poésie est d’abord, doit être le langage du lion, du bœuf et de l’aigle, et s’achever dans le langage de l’homme” (Bounoure 1969: 22). Yet somehow, Bounoure still manages to detect the traces of “les angles de la Kabbale” (24), which, as Steven Jaron argues much later in, had at best only constituted a “Judaism in the margin” (Jaron 2003: 16ff) that was still quite divorced from any serious poetic preoccupation for Jabès in Cairo. Following Bounoure’s introduction of Jabès to the world of French letters, Derrida skims over Je bâtis ma demeure: “On relira mieux désormais Je bâtis ma

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demeure. Un certain lierre risquait d’en cacher le sens ou de l’aspirer, de le détourner vers soi. De l’humour et des jeux, des rires et des rondes, des chansons s’enroulaient gracieusement autour d’une parole qui, de n’avoir pas encore aimé sa vraie racine, pliait un peu au vent. Ne se dressait pas encore pour dire seulement la rectitude et la rigidité du devoir poétique” (Derrida 1967: 99). He then directs his attention to a close reading of Le livre des questions, and arrives at the important realization that “[p]our Jabès, qui reconnaît avoir découvert très tard une certaine appartenance au judaïsme, le Juif n’est que l’allégorie souffrante” (112). In turn, Blanchot and Levinas’s interests in reading Jabès also revolve around the allegorized Judaism of the poet’s Parisian books. In line with this tradition of Jabès scholarship, later important academic inquiry into his writings includes Mary Ann Caws’ monograph, Edmond Jabès (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988); the edited volume of the proceedings of the Cerisyla-Salle conference on the poet by Richard Stamelman and Mary Ann Caws, Écrire le livre : autour d’Edmond Jabès (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1989); Richard Stamelman, “The Nomadic Writing of Exile: Edmond Jabès,” in Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990); Steven Jaron (op. cit.); Farid Laroussi, Écritures du sujet : Michaux, Jabès, Gracq, Tournier (Mons: Sils Maria, 2006); and Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, Envisager Dieu avec Edmond Jabès (Paris: Cerf, 2007). 3 In Du désert au livre, his long interview with Marcel Cohen in 1980, Jabès had already articulated his interest in the most elementary functionality of words. In fact, he goes so far as to advocate for a platitudinous writing horizon: — […] vous acceptez les « platitudes .” Mieux même : vous les revendiquez. — Oui, je crois qu’écrire c’est, aussi, écrire platement. Je pense qu’il ne faut pas chercher dans un texte à écarter à tout prix la banalité. La banalité est un véhicule. C’est à partir d’elle que nous pouvons aller plus au fond. Et sans elle, comment saurions-nous seulement que nous allons plus au fond ? La banalité, c’est la surface, une surface à explorer, puis à crever. Max Jacob m’a beaucoup sensibilisé à ces problèmes alors que je n’avais qu’une vingtaine d’années. […] Ce n’est que beaucoup plus tard que je compris qu’écrire, c’est à la fois écrire ample et serré. C’est aussi, par moments, écrire plat ; la platitude qui sert de socle à l’image, à la pensée, mettant mieux en valeur celles-ci. Dans mon cas, il y avait un autre problème à résoudre : mes livres n’ont ni lieu, ni temps, du fait même de la multiplicité des personnages et des différentes époques auxquelles ils appartiennent [dans Le livre des questions]. Faute de le souligner, comment distinguer un personnage du passé d’un contemporain ? J’ai tenté d’opérer la distinction par le biais même de l’écriture. Les « anciens » disent les choses les plus simples, ce qui, aujourd’hui, nous paraît banal à force d’avoir été répété. Dans son désir de nouveauté, le contemporain paraîtra plus original. (70-71) Jabès’s complete eschewal of poetic subjectivity following his Egyptian period, and his explicit preference for the commonplace bear an important

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resemblance to the preoccupations of a later generation of French poets. For instance, in the preface to his anthology of modern French and translated American poetry, Tout le monde se ressemble (1995), Emmanuel Hocquard (b. 1940) dedicates an important development to the concept of the “lieu commun” (23-24). The title of Hocquard’s anthology is itself taken from a formulation by Keith Waldrop, the husband of Jabès’s friend and translator Rosmarie Waldrop. The platitudinous and the commonplace interest Jabès, Hocquard, Waldrop and other poets because, just like grammar rules, everyone has access to them (and thus “tout le monde se ressemble”); but just because grammar rules, platitudes and commonplaces are shared by everyone, it does not follow that they are used in exactly the same way. Hocquard’s concepts of “intention” and “intonation” (16-21) are what differentiate surface resemblances from one person and writer to another. Of course, these modern poetic preoccupations have a rich history in the twentieth-century, beginning with the American Objectivists’ early efforts into the de-subjectification of poetic language (as early as Charles Reznikoff’s first collections in 1918 and 1919, Rhythms and Rhythms II), through Jabès’s bifurcated mid-century literary itinerary and poetic place (from Je bâtis ma demeure to Le livre des questions), and the poetic research ongoing today in French (from Jacques Roubaud’s 1986 Quelque chose noir to Jean-Marie Gleize’s 2009 collection of essays, Sorties). 4 This and all other translations are my own unless otherwise noted. The original French henceforth follows in the notes. Très jeune encore, les scrutant dans mon livre d’histoire où ils étaient reproduits en photographie, je rêvais à des poèmes sur papyrus que les poètes anciens d’Arabie, au mur de la Kaaba, exposaient, afin que les chefs des tribus et les savants de toutes les contrées venus en pèlerinage les emportent avec eux et les chantent et les propagent sous leur tente. Le poème offert ainsi aux yeux de l’étranger, celui-ci, s’il ne le transformait pas chez lui après l’avoir lu, ou le plus souvent, seulement écouté, du moins le situait-il dans une atmosphère propre à son tempérament. Le long cri du poète s’amplifiait de bouches en bouches, chacun retenant de lui, un seul ou deux vers qui le caractérisait en général, et vrai miracle de la poésie, se construisait d’une strophe choisie et arrangée, un poème suggéré. (quoted by Jaron 2000: 18-19; emphasis added) 5 Le miracle de Chawki c’est qu’il a su d’emblée, comme par un déclic oublié, réintroduire le mouvement dans une langue devenue statique, y nuancer à l’extrême l’expression du sentiment, allier la grâce à la gravité dans un style où chacun saluait l’éclosion de sa propre personnalité jusque-là silencieuse. Et, de fait, par-delà les frontières de l’Égypte, tout le Liban, la Syrie, une partie de l’Irak reprirent en chœur les poèmes de Chawki au point que ceux-ci finirent par former un fond sonore, un inépuisable réservoir à la fois linguistique et affectif. Il n’est pas rare, aujourd’hui encore, pour qui circule entre Beyrouth, Damas et Alep, de s’arrêter au bord de la route, de pénétrer dans une humble maison de paysans et d’y entendre réciter quelque fragment des « Chawkiyâtes ». (Henein 2006: 726; emphasis added)

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6

Il regardait l’univers jaillir de l’abîme pour s’y engouffrer ensuite, préoccupé de sa propre disparition. Comme l’homme, de la mort. Ah ce vide, ce vide que rien ne trouble.

Un nouveau seuil ? —Un regard, tourné vers l’ailleurs ; la brusque révision d’un parcours. (Jabès 1991: 15) 7 Écrire, maintenant, uniquement pour faire savoir qu’un jour j’ai cessé d’exister ; que tout, au-dessus et autour de moi, est devenu bleu, immense étendue vide pour l’envol de l’aigle dont les ailes puissantes, en battant, répètent à l’infini les gestes de l’adieu au monde. Oui, uniquement pour confirmer que j’ai cessé d’exister le jour où l’oiseau rapace a occupé seul l’espace de ma vie et du livre, pour régner en maître et dévorer ce qui, une fois encore, cherchait, en moi, à naître et que je tentais d’exprimer. (Jabès 1991: 9) 8 —Je me souviens. Le soleil nous traversait la peau. […] Le ciel avait la transparence du verre qu’un aigle hautain semblait vouloir rayer de ses griffes, puis briser impitoyablement. Le soir, on aurait vu les bris de verre se métamorphoser en diamants : « … comme des lunes naines », disais-tu. Mais non. L’aigle, manifestement, nous dédaignait. (Jabès 1991: 82-83) 9 Nous entendions huir, au loin, les milans roux. Nous les suivions dans leur envol et leur fuite précipitée. Alentours, des vautours fouillassaient l’espace, encouragé—on eût dit—par une hyène solitaire dont le cri nous fit, la première fois, sursauter. Elle était tout près de nous et nous ne nous en étions pas aperçus. (Jabès 1991: 83) 10 D’un éclair, l’éternité fait un clou rubigineux, comme de la minute téméraire, elle fait un inutile marteau. (Jabès 1989: 11) 11 Et comme je le pressais de me donner une définition de la fraternité, il me répondit : « Dans l’obscure forêt où nous nous croisons, la fraternité est, peut-être, l’imperceptible bruissement auroral qui, de part en part, la traverse et la fait frissonner. » Penché vers le sol, tel un arbre malade, frappé au cœur par la foudre, le corps déformé par la bosse, si lourde charge, disgracieux fardeaux de chair et d’os, qui est-il, aujourd’hui et qu’espère-t-il ? Il disait : « Créer, aimer vous faire pousser des ailes mais, un jour, on s’aperçoit que, d’avoir longtemps cessé de battre, elles ne forment plus, couchées l’une sur l’autre, qu’une bosse dont on ne peut se défaire. » Et il ajoutait : « N’est-ce pas curieux que les ailes soient l’apanage du dos comme si, prévoyantes, elles cherchaient, par avance, à soustraire à la vue leur inexorable déchéance ? » (Jabès 1989: 123; emphasis added) 12 Résumons. Le monolingue dont je parle, il parle une langue dont il est privé. Ce n’est pas la sienne, le français. Parce qu’il est donc privé de toute langue, et qu’il n’a plus d’autre recours—ni l’arabe, ni le berbère, ni l’hébreu, ni aucune des langues qu’auraient parlées des ancêtres—, parce que ce monolingue est en

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quelque sorte aphasique (peut-être écrit-il parce qu’il est aphasique), il est jeté dans la traduction absolue, une traduction sans pôle de référence, sans langue originaire, sans langue de départ. Il n’y a pour lui que des langues d’arrivée, si tu veux, mais des langues qui, singulière aventure, n’arrivent pas à s’arriver, dès lors qu’elles ne savent plus d’où elles partent, à partir de quoi elles parlent, et quel est le sens de leur trajet. Des langues sans itinéraire, et surtout sans autoroute de je ne sais quelle information. (Derrida 1996: 117; emphasis in original) 13 —Que viens-tu faire dans mon pays ? —De tous les pays, le tien m’est le plus cher. —Ton attachement à ma patrie ne justifie pas ta permanente présence parmi nous. —Que me rapproches-tu ? —Étranger, tu seras, toujours, pour moi un étranger. Ta place est chez toi et non ici. —Ton pays est celui de ma langue. (Jabès 1991: 51)

References Al-Qays, Imru’. Mu‘allaqah. In Jones, 4-86. Blanchot, Maurice. L’amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Bonoure, Gabriel. Edmond Jabès : la demeure et le livre. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1969. Cahen, Didier. Edmond Jabès. Paris: Seghers, 2007. Caws, Mary Ann. Edmond Jabès. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. Daly, M. W., et al., eds. The Cambridge History of Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Debrauwere-Miller, Nathalie. Envisager Dieu avec Edmond Jabès. Paris: Cerf, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. —. Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse de l’origine. Paris: Galilée, 1996. —. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. —. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowl. Edited by Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Gleize, Jean-Marie. Sorties. Paris: Questions Théoriques, 2009. Henein, Georges. Œuvres. Edited by Pierre Vilar et al. Paris: Denoël, 2006. Hocquard, Emmanuel. Tout le monde se ressemble : une anthologie de poésie contemporaine. Paris: P.O.L., 1995. Hussein, Taha. Fi al-sh‘ir al-jahili. Edited by Sameh Kurayim. Cairo: AlDar al-Masriyah al-Libnaniyah, 2010.

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Jabès, Edmond. Du désert au livre : entretiens avec Marcel Cohen. Paris: Belfond, 1980. —. Un étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. —. Le livre de l’hospitalité. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Jaron, Steven. Portrait(s) d’Edmond Jabès. Paris: BnF, 2000. —. Edmond Jabès: The Hazard of Exile. Oxford: Legenda, 2003. Jones, Alan, ed. and trans. Early Arabic Poetry: Volume 2. Reading: University of Oxford Faculty of Oriental Studies, 1996. Khatibi, Abdelkébir. “La langue de l’autre.” In Œuvres d’Abdelkébir Khatibi III : essais, 115-135. Paris: La Différence, 2008. Kober, Marc et al., eds. Entre Nil et sable : écrivains d’Égypte d’expression française (1920-1960). Paris: CNDP, 1999. Lançon, Daniel. Jabès l’Égyptien. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1998. Langlet, Irène. “Recueil de recueils : l’exemple d’Edmond Jabès.” Le recueil poétique. Edited by Didier Alexandre, Madeleine Frédéric and Jean-Marie Gleize. Special issue of Méthode ! 2 (2002): 65-71. Laroussi, Farid. Écritures du sujet : Michaux, Jabès, Gracq, Tournier. Mons: Sils Maria, 2006. Moscatelli, Jean. Poètes en Egypte. Cairo: L’Atelier, 1955. Reznikoff, Charles. The Poems of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975. Edited by Seamus Cooney. Boston: Black Sparrow, 2005. Roubaud, Jacques. Quelque chose noire. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Stamelman, Richard and Mary Ann Caws, eds. Écrire le livre : autour d’Edmond Jabès. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1989. Stamelman, Richard. Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Waldrop, Rosmarie. Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Weiss, Jason. Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.

CHAPTER NINE WHAT IS NEW ABOUT AMADOU HAMPATÉ BÂ? TRANSLATION, INTERPRETING, AND LITERARY HISTORY JEANNE GARANE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Ironies and Paradoxes In The Trickster in West Africa. A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight, Robert Pelton demonstrates that in a number of West African traditions the trickster is a cultural transformer and mediator, who constantly moves between the centers and peripheries of power. One of the agents of this intermediary realm is the Yoruba deity Esu, trickster, messenger, and interpreter of the sacred in Yoruba tradition. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. points out in The Signifying Monkey, Hermes is his “Western kinsman” (8), for Hermes is also a messenger, a go-between and trickster, patron saint of thieves, translators, and interpreters, master of tricks and transformations” (Assmann 1996: 98).1 As the title of Pelton's work suggests, the trickster is an ironic figure whose multiformity and ambiguity can either be destructive, or it can serve the socio-religious purpose of restoring order from disorder, of meeting life’s paradoxes through paradox itself. Similarly, in Irony's Edge, Linda Hutcheon writes that irony “can and does function tactically in the service of a wide range of political positions, legitimating or undercutting a wide variety of interests” (10). This is because irony operates in the open space between fixed positions. Cultural translation is similarly ironic because it operates between two or more fixed positions as it attempts to represent one culture in the terms of another more or less successfully. In this essay, I examine the ways in which Amadou Hampâté Bâ's preservation of the African past through translation, as well as his own dealings with and reflections on colonial ethnography can help to (re)view

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and (re)document the ironic figure of the indigenous African interpreter as a trickster figure whose importance as an intercultural power broker has sometimes been ignored. I suggest that indigenous interpreters, who constantly manipulated the imperializing wish for transparency and control, can serve as an ironic model for the agency not only of the intercultural translator but also of the Francophone African writer, who, like the interpreter, performs a “triangular” balancing act that simultaneously pits his or her own interests against the competing and at times conflicting concerns of national and international readerships. It is important to note that this agency can lead just as easily to opacity as it can to transparency. As such, it corresponds to a “foreignizing” ethics of translation that rejects a “fluent” model of translation that domesticates the text by smoothing out its “foreign” elements in order to make the translated text more acceptable to the target audience.2 In “Mother Courage's Cucumbers,” translation theorist André Lefevere writes, “a romanticist approach to literature [asks] the wretched question, ‘in how far is all this new?’ It is a wretched question because nothing is ever new; the new is a combination of various elements from the old, the non-canonized, imports from other systems...rearranged to suit alternative functional views of literature”(253). Following Lefevere's lead, it could thus be said that the question, “What is New About Hampâté Bâ?” is similarly wretched because for Bâ (1900-1991), the “new” was in fact a collection of elements from the “old,” insofar as his work involved collecting, documenting, transcribing, and translating West African oral traditions and cultural practices, and “recreating” them in French.3 Indeed, it is perhaps because of Bâ's fame for his dedication to preserving the West African “oral” past by translating it into writing that, in Littératures d'Afrique noire (1995), Alain Ricard asks whether Amadou Hampâté Bâ's work is ‘outdated’ (152) claiming that the majority of it was written, if not published before 1960, during the colonial period.4 In addition, according to Kusum Aggarwal, Bâ's (Western) readers have rarely been able to “resist the anthropological prejudice” whereby his texts tend to be read as “relics of a bygone past, for their documentary value.”5 However, according to Lefevere, the translator “rewrites” and “recreates” a text by carrying it over to a new target culture, in a process where “neither the word, nor the text, but the culture becomes the operational ‘unit’ of translation” (Lefevere and Bassnett 8). This notion of cultural translation as recreation can also be linked to the ways in which “orality” is recreated and translated into a written text, although not without difficulty. As JeanMarc Moura puts it, Bâ’s work confronts the complexities of “introducing an oral culture into the concerns of another culture that accords primacy to

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written archives, and which is therefore ill-prepared (and ill-disposed) to meet [its] requirements” (94). These difficulties are encapsulated in contradictory views surrounding the veracity of the oral versus the written text. As Bâ explains in “The Living Tradition,” “in the modern nations, where what is written has precedence over what is spoken, where the book is the principal vehicle of the cultural heritage, there has been a longstanding notion that peoples without writing are peoples without culture...Nothing proves a priori that writing gives a more faithful account of reality than oral evidence handed down from generation to generation” (167-168) . This is precisely why Amadou Hampâté Bâ is famously known as the man who proclaimed, “in Africa, when an old man dies, a library burns.”6 For many, this statement has been elevated to the illustrious rank of an “old African Proverb” steeped in the traditional wisdom of the past, while for others, it is yet another indication of how an outdated notion of “tradition” impedes literary and other development in Africa. In fact, in January, 2012, the Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf of Columbia University proclaimed the statement to be “the worst idea ever to come out of Africa…Because, quite simply, one can not count on the power of a gerontocracy to conceive of the future…if African mentalities do not change, we will not go forward. If we do not regulate our relationship with tradition, we will not go forward.” This statement, although probably intended as a critique of African political rather than literary figures later raised a number of protest responses, demonstrating that Bâ's pronouncement still carries some weight.7 In contradistinction to this view of the “vieillard” as the repository of traditional knowledge, Bâ's elder also continues to live on through parody. For example, in Verre cassé Alain Mabanckou gently mocks the celebrated statement, albeit in a colloquial writing style that ironically uses the informalities of spoken French as a contemporary version of orality. In that novel, the narrator keeps a notebook for the owner of the bar Le Crédit a voyagé (an obvious reference to Louis Ferdinand Céline’s two novels Voyage au bout de la nuit and Mort à crédit, each of which incorporate “oral” French slang) who wants to ensure that the memory of the drinking establishment will not disappear by recording everything that happens there in writing. Mabanckou introduces a second irony when we read that the notebook before our eyes was intended for the boss’ eyes alone. Here, the wise elder as depository of traditional knowledge is nothing but a “grabataire,” a bedridden invalid on the verge of death. In fact, the narrator states that for his boss,

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the time for stories told by a bedridden grandmother was over…from now on writing would take over because it is all that remains, the word is black smoke, wild cat piss, the boss of Le Crédit a voyagé does not like fixed formulas such as ‘in Africa, when an old man dies, a library burns,’ and when he hears this well developed cliché, he gets mad and yells out, ‘that depends on which elder, cut the crap, I only trust what is written…8

In fact, Verre cassé is replete with intertextual references to the canonical French-language literature that fills the head of the narrator, a former teacher, as well as to the spoken words of famous figures in world history. In a related move, Abdourahman A. Waberi also refers to the statement in “Ecrivains en position d'entraver.” Although he never targets Bâ himself, Waberi alludes to the phrase as an illustration of the continuing tendency to reduce francophone African literature to a stereotypical “oral tradition” devoid of individual creativity. He cites the phrase as an example of an outdated literary preoccupation by Western critics who too often link “tradition” to Western ethnography. In fact, Waberi mocks those whom he calls the guardians of the temple of ethnographic particularism, who weep for the “death of any old man sporting a long beard and an immaculate boubou while uncovering in the ashes of his logorrhea the final traces of a library in flames” (69).9 While Waberi is correct to criticize those who deny the agency of the African writer by approaching francophone literature from the narrow angle of ethnography, it is worth noting that Bâ's entire oeuvre was dedicated to documenting and preserving the past by calling on the “prodigiously faithful African memory”10 (Wangrin 360) and then transcribing this memory into written Fulfulde and/or translating it into written French, in order to preserve it for future generations of Africans and non-Africans alike. Significantly, Bâ's voluminous Mémoires have just been republished by Actes Sud in its prestigious Thesaurus collection. For Tirthankar Chanda, this confirms that “in Africa as elsewhere, every time an elder dies, it is not a library that burns!”11 This renewed attention to Bâ's writing seems to confirm Bâ's own prophetic words about his own modernity: “How many times have young people said to me: ‘Mister Hampâté Bâ, your time has passed.’ I reply, ‘You are the ones who haven’t arrived yet.”12

The Library and le Vieillard, or, Literature as Document To return to the question posed in the title of this essay, I argue that one manifestation of Bâ's “newness” therefore lies, at least for the specific purposes of this essay, in the ways in which he “translates” and thereby

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“documents” the mostly undocumented multifarious figure of the indigenous African interpreter, who has also recently begun to garner renewed attention from scholars of African literature, and history.13 Indeed, in examining the ways in which the native informant/interpreter in L'Etrange destin de Wangrin ou les roueries d'un interprète africain and Amkoullel, l'enfant peul14 at once maintains and overturns the conventional image of the colonized subaltern, I argue that the interpreter’s constant complex negotiations with colonizer and colonized alike eventually raise him to the status (if not at first the age) of a vieillard, but one of a different sort, whose traditional knowledge is not always used to the benefit of a putative intercultural dialogue. Indeed, although he sometimes helped to build bridges between peoples of different cultures through translation, the indigenous interpreter just as often burned them through linguistic and cultural manipulation and mistranslation. Bâ shows that the interpreter was a somewhat corrupt “elder” whose deep knowledge of tradition was often used to his own benefit and to the benefit of those who could purchase his favors in a world where ancient customs had been modified by colonial cupidity, and that this “elder” operated within an ironic ethics of ambiguity introduced by colonialism itself. As an intermediary between the European colonizer and the colonizer’s African targets, the interpreter became, as Monica Wilson puts it, a powerful “cultural broker” (in Levine, 50), whose agency was established through a triangular balancing act. Teswajini Niranajna argues that because the colonial project relied on translation in order to contain and control its subjects, the study of translation practices can contribute to a re-writing of history [and literature] from postcolonial perspectives (172). Thus, it is important to note that while the interpreter’s ambiguity may have been constitutive of agency, it is perhaps because of this very ambiguity that, with the exception of Bâ’s work, his traces are difficult to recover.15 Indeed, the colonial archives seem to contain relatively little information regarding the names and activities of the indigenous interpreters who were active during the French conquest of West Africa. For instance, the database of the French Centre des Archives d’Outre Mer (CAOM) in Aix-en-Provence lists Amadou Hampâté Bâ as one of the only secondary sources on indigenous interpreters in colonial French West Africa.16 Thomas McClendon speculates that “the relative silence of the colonial archive concerning African interpreters may... reflect official disdain for such employees rather than their literal non-existence” (79). Indigenous interpreters had to manipulate their African constituents and colonial government officials while attempting to maintain their own interests. According to Roger S. Levine, this strategy would explain why the lives

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and actions of so many other African interpreters “are not so easily recoverable from the historical record” (51). One exception that seems to confirm this unfortunate rule is Emily Osborn's archival recovery of the story of Boubou Penda, interpreter to colonial administrator Ernest Noirot in French Guinea, whose traces she recovered only in archival documents concerning Noirot himself.17 According to Michael Cronin, “in any assessment of the impact of translation on humanity, past and present” (46), the importance of interpreting and interpreters should be highlighted because the “problematic transcultural role” (53) they played in colonial encounters has not been sufficiently analyzed.18 In fact, in a number of texts by Western travel writers and ethnographers, he writes, the interpreter as native informant is accorded a certain epistemological innocence even as he/she: confers a legitimacy and verisimilitude on the narrative as a privileged source of ‘inside’ information...How representative the views of these informants are, their exact social position within their own communities, and the extent to which their familiarity with Western languages sets them apart from their own people are issues rarely addressed. (54)

It is precisely by examining the role of the indigenous African interpreter as ironic intercultural translator and power broker in Amadou Hampâté Bâ's work that one can begin to address this gaping hole in the material history of translation and interpretation. As will be seen, for the indigenous interpreter, under colonialism, the manipulation of cultural values and expectations along with linguistic mistranslation often predominated over the altruistic aim of bridging cultural divides and establishing dialogue through translation. Although readers of Francophone African literature are certain to be familiar with Bâ’s L'Etrange destin de Wangrin, ou les roueries d'un interprète africain, about the indigenous African interpreter named Samaké Niambele (or Samako Niembélé), alias Samba Traoré (or Taraore), alias Wangrin, alias Gongoloma-Soké who tricks the white colonial administrators as well as Africans placed in positions of power in the colony of French Soudan, Wangrin has often been taken to be a (semi-) fictional figure. Bâ has repeatedly denied this assertion, given that Wangrin's story was a combination of Wangrin's own speech and corroborating evidence that Bâ collected from others who knew him. Indeed, Bâ clearly intended that all of his work serve a documentary purpose, and this goes for Amkoullel, l'enfant peul, Oui, Mon commandant!, and Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar, three other works

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in which indigenous African interpreters, including Bâ himself, play an important role. In Amkoullel, Bâ asserts that he “restitutes” rather than simply “remembers” events, and compares the accuracy of his memory to a kind of documentary film that has recorded these events “from the beginning to the end in its entirety” (11, 144, 278).19 While one may argue about the veracity of documentary films, the nature of reality, or the accuracy of memory, the point here is that for Bâ, a memory steeped in the oral tradition may serve to document the past and to preserve it for future generations. This is why Bâ always refused to call L'Etrange destin de Wangrin, ou les roueries d'un interprète africain a fiction, despite its classification as a novel by its French publisher. This section therefore examines the ramifications of reading Bâ's texts on indigenous African interpreters as historiography rather than as fiction, and thus of taking Bâ at his word.20 In any case, to argue as I do here that several of Bâ’s works can serve as documents that help to contextualize the figure of the indigenous interpreter in colonial French West Africa is not necessarily to ignore their literary value, but to further explore the ways in which translation and interpretation are central elements of Bâ’s work. Paradoxically, the first consequence of reading Bâ’s work as documentary non-fiction is the risk of denying his authorial agency. In “Ecrivains en position d’entraver,” Abdourahman A. Waberi argues that much of francophone African literature continues to be read as sociopolitical document rather than as creative art because of a preoccupation with identifying “orality” as the “origin” of the text. This can lead to readings whereby a poem or piece of prose is “neutralized in its own specificity and tumultuousness, dismissed as folklore or as a kind of sociological vulgate, sent back to the prehistoric universe of fables and legends” (69-70).21 This is because historically, there has been a tendency to view francophone African writers as the derivative “translators” of preexisting African socio-cultural realities and oral African literatures in a world where translation has been seen as an inferior form of authorship. This view maintains the conventional binary opposition between author and “original” text on the one hand, and translator and derived text on the other. For example, in the preface to Paul Hazoumé’s Doguicimi, the colonial administrator and architect of French-language education in French West Africa, Georges Hardy, claims that Hazoumé “invents nothing. He is content to choose, from among the heroes and events of a particular time and place, those that seem the most representative...” (37 in Watts).22

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To further the paradox, it can also be argued that to ignore Bâ’s repeated assertion that he wrote nothing but the “truth” constitutes a denial of his agency as a traditionalist. Bâ often insists on his role as a trustworthy transmitter of traditional orality, and to call him a liar concerning his role in this transmission would constitute a supreme insult. Indeed in the postface to Wangrin, he writes, “my training as a ‘traditionalist’ demands that the transmitter of a narrative add nothing of himself, unless it be a few formal embellishments.”23 As Bâ further notes in his essay entitled “The Living Tradition,” “More than all other men the [traditionalists]...are bound to respect the truth. For them, lying is not merely a moral blemish, but a ritual interdict...” (174). In this regard, for Abiola Irele, L'Etrange destin de Wangrin is a compelling reconstruction of the colonial experience, and as such, a social document of great significance. …[It] provides a fascinating record of the beginnings of French rule in... ‘le Soudan Français’ ... register[ing] the formidable impact of this historical process…upon Africans of every class and station in the region…Bâ...writes as a concerned witness of the unique conjunction of events that marked the violent incursion of the French into the African world. (vii)

While the writer cannot control the way in which his/her texts will be read, these assertions nevertheless allow for a reading of Bâ’s works as a unique combination of cultural translation, historiography, and literature.

Power, Indigenous African Interpreters, and the Ambiguities of Intercultural Translation During the colonial conquest and the subsequent establishment of a colonial administrative bureaucracy, the “carrying across” of indigenous cultures, that is, their translation into various forms to be consumed by the colonizer (fables, traditions, religious beliefs, etc.), depended on “native informants” and/ as interpreters. However, native informants and indigenous interpreters were not necessarily one and the same. A “native informant” could “inform” through an interpreter, and was not necessarily trained in the colonizer’s language and culture. This stemmed from the conviction that it was necessary to know Africa in order to govern it effectively. To this end the IFAN, the Insitut Français d’Afrique Noire was created in 1936 and involved the collection, documentation, transcription, and translation of cultural artifacts such as folktales, religious practices and beliefs, language lexicons. This work would have been impossible without native informants/interpreters. Beginning in 1942, Amadou Hampâté Bâ

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himself was employed by the IFAN following his service as a secretary and at times an interpreter for a variety of colonial administrators. Thirty years earlier, Wangrin was at the forefront of this imperializing “will to power” through knowledge of the other, and Bâ was pulled into its wake. As Bâ explains in Amkoullel, Wangrin was instructed by the colonial agent François Equilbecq to go about collecting folktales, and it was through Equilbecq that Bâ first met Wangrin. According to Bâ, When I first met him, Wangrin had just been sent by the commandant to an agent for colonial affairs who was passing through Bandiagara, Mr. François-Victor Equibecq, who was traveling the entire region in order to carry out the collection of the greatest number possible of Sudanese folktales. When Mr. Equibecq arrived in Bandiagara in June, 1912, the district commandant sent out a convocation to all those men, women, elders, or children who knew any tales to appear before the new arrival. I was among the children chosen to appear. The informant of every tale that was retained for the collection was paid ten, fifteen, or twenty centimes, according to its length or its importance…A large part of these tales collected in 1913 would be published by E. Leroux in the "Collection des contes et chants populaires,” a text that would be reissued in 1972 by Maisonneuve et Larose under the title Contes populaires d'Afrique occidentale. (Amkoullel 289-90)24

Although Equilbecq claimed authorship for this work under the title Contes populaires d’Afrique occidentale (1913), he credits Samaké Niambélé/Samba Taraoré, alias Wangrin, as the teller or collector of most of the tales. As Bâ explains further, At first, Wangrin translated them for M. Equibecq, who took notes. But soon, the latter gave the task of the direct collection of most of the texts over to Wangrin. Wangrin would write out the first draft translation in French, and then he would give it to Mr. Equibecq who would occasionally make corrections or modifications as he saw fit…It is not uninteresting to note that Wangrin was one of the primary writers. His name is cited after most of the tales, preceded by the phrase, ‘translated by,’ or ‘interpreted by.’ My name is also mentioned in a few places. (Amkoullel 289-90).25

Thus, in 1912, at the age of twelve, under the nickname Amkoullel or “little” Koullel, Bâ was the source of “a large number” of the tales which he himself had learned them from Koullel “the greatest raconteur of traditional tales along that loop of the Niger” (xvii).26 As we know, Bâ’s role as collector of tales for Wangrin/Ecquilibecq foreshadowed that of biographer and chronicler. “One day he came up to me and said: My little Amkoullel, in days gone by you were a fine storyteller. Now that you have

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learned to write, you must take down the story of my life …”27 This parallels Bâ’s additional adult role as the transmitter of Tierno Bokar’s Tidjani teachings in Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar. Bâ translated these teachings into a French-language manuscript which he gave to the colonial administrator Marcel Cardaire, who then claimed “co-authorship” with Bâ, as we shall see below. Like Wangrin before him, Bâ himself was one of the sons of chiefs "requisitioned" (Amkoullel 257) to be sent to “the school for hostages,” or L’Ecole des otages created to ensure the allegiance of customary chiefs to France and to train their sons to be “domestics, servants, cooks…subaltern office employees, classroom monitors28 or interpreters. While Bâ explains that Wangrin was a forced intermediary between the Black and White worlds (366), in Amkoullel, Bâ adds that once he himself was “requisitioned” and forced to learn French, he decided to do so in order to be able to “speak directly to the commandant” (272), that is, without the intervention of an interpreter. The monumental task of translating and transmitting his culture in L’Empire peul du Macina and other works can be viewed as a feat analogous to that of “speaking directly to the commandant” because Bâ did so, as he explains in The Living Tradition, without recourse to the colonial library and in the terms of the numerous oral sources he himself located. As Kusum Aggarwal writes in this regard, “the refusal to refer to the colonial library, and notably to the corpus of works having to do with the Peuls, can been seen as the will to turn away from written knowledge…which had not been able to produce an image of Africa that would correspond to an indigenous conception of African reality.”29 Likewise, Bâ’s revised version of Tierno Bokar, le sage de Bandiagara (“coauthored” with Marcel Cardaire in 1957), but subsequently republished by Bâ alone as Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar. Le Sage de Bandiagara (1980) can also be seen in a similar light, since the aim of the work is to communicate the teachings of Tierno Bokar to a non-Muslim audience in terms that were carefully chosen by Bâ and approved by Tierno Bokar himself without recourse to colonial officials. Just as the young Hampâté Bâ served as a kind of “native informant” for Wangrin and Equilbecq in the collection of African folktales to be translated into French, then, so the older Bâ was placed in a similar position by the colonial administration in the person of Marcel Cardaire. In Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar, Bâ explains that Cardaire held the title of Officer of Muslim Affairs under the colonial regime. In fact, Cardaire had been sent by the French government to

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Chapter Nine concern himself with Muslim affairs and to carry out an investigation on me…He visited me morning and night…During the year we had daily interviews, I answered all of his questions on African traditions, religious locales, Islam, the way of Tidjanism, and, in particular, the Tidjani practice of the so-called ‘eleven beads.’ I also handed over to Captain Cardaire a voluminous written documentation, a part of which was constituted from the teachings and writings that I had received from Tierno Bokar.30

Cardaire asked Bâ to write the text to which Cardaire himself would add his own personal reflections, or “appréciations personnelles,” which, in Cardaire’s view made them “coauthors.” This is how Bâ wrote the draft of “the life of Tierno Bokar and of his teachings, a manuscript that I gave Marcel Cardaire, placing complete confidence in him for its use.”31 According to Bâ, the work was published by Présence Africaine without his having seen the proofs, with the result that “a few small errors had found their way in” (9). “Bâ therefore later decided to proceed in the complete rewriting of the first work, and to take the opportunity to complete it, all the while conserving its original format.”32 It was not until 1980, at the age of eighty, then, that Bâ could claim sole authorship of this text. This last example shows that while the interpreter/informant was an indispensable mediator, he continued to be treated as a permanent subaltern, be he Amadou Hampâté Bâ himself. As a study of the role and power of indigenous interpreters during the colonial era demonstrates, however, while French colonial administrators and/as ethnographers may have held this attitude, they did so at their own expense. According to Lawrence, Osborn, and Roberts, indigenous interpreters were at the height of their power and influence “during the early phases of colonial conquest and the subsequent periods of establishing colonial rule” (21). They kept the commandants, or colonial administrators, “turning in a narrow circle of intrigues out of which [they] had no escape because [they were] dependent upon them for information, for translation, for mediation, and often for the basic necessities of daily life, such as food, labor, and sexual services” (21). The colonial administration eventually took steps to curtail this power and influence, and the reliability of the interpreter was sometimes paradoxically measured in reverse proportion to his proximity to colonial structures. In fact, in his Manuel d'ethnographie, pioneering ethnographer and colonial administrator Marcel Griaule established a set of criteria for locating the ideal native informant. According to Griaule, the ideal informant who does not lie, who does not pretend to be what he is not, is a rare commodity…Blacks have a natural penchant for lying and imposture…The exemplary informant is the one able to maintain a

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distance from the changes introduced by colonization in order to maintain his natural purety…A type of liar that it is important to use only with circumspection is the informant having undergone the influence of Europeans. Converted to foreign religions, covered with a patina that he is almost always proud of, the evolved native…is never very favorable to investigation. One cannot be both in school and in the sacred wood.33

Wangrin constituted the complete opposite of this ideal. In fact, he was initiated into the “bois sacré” or “sacred forest” of the Bambara Komo religion (18-19) while simultaneously undergoing a forced French education. As a result, he became an extremely powerful man in colonial French Sudan, for he was able to deal in the traditional cultural currency of West African civilizations while manipulating the French colonial desire to dominate the region both by force and through its “mission civilisatrice.” Wangrin’s power and prestige were completely contrary to the original intentions behind the School for Hostages, created as seen above, not only to secure the submission of the chiefs and other notables whose sons were sent to the schools, but also to ensure that its graduates would become servants in the colonial machine. In L’Etrange destin de Wangrin, Wangrin’s French diploma is characterized as “a miraculous key, an open sesame”34 that allowed him and other indigenous African interpreters like him to accumulate such power and wealth that, according to Anna Niang they were viewed as the practitioners of “a magic art” (36) whose power placed them in the position of “high official(s), envied and feared by all” (35). This led to what Niang calls the “myth of the African interpreter” (36) as a kind of powerful magician and master of the “inbetween.” In L’Etrange destin de Wangrin, the narrator in fact characterizes Wangrin as a “sorcerer,” and throughout the tale of his life, we witness Wangrin’s gradual rise to the position of “master in the material”35 of the occult, able to interpret and manipulate hidden forces, and hence, his fellow human beings, as long as he is under the protection of GongolomaSooké, the fabulous deity who constitutes, “the great confluence of opposites.”36 While in Amkoullel, Bâ compares the indigenous interpreter to an “owl that…everywhere accompanies the sorcerer,” and calls interpreters “good White-Blacks” and “half-European negroes,” because they are the constant companions and accomplices of the so-called “White-Whites” and “gods of the bush, conquerors and supreme leaders of the country,”37 in L’Etrange destin de Wangrin, on the other hand, it is Wangrin himself and his rival Romo Sibedi who are the sorcerers able to manipulate the destinies of the powerful, due to their ties with the occult. Whether European or African, their victims are fair game because they

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themselves have entered the corrupt and corrupting race to gain wealth and influence. This is all the more “fair” given that Wangrin always announces ahead of time his intention to “trick” his fellows in positions of power. Indeed, the narrator tells us that once accepted by the deity and having taken the pseudonym Gongoloma-Sooké, “Wangrin did not hide the fact that he counted on Gongoloma-Sooké to inspire him and help him when he unleashed what he called the ‘ferocious affairs’ in which he would be involved.”38 While for their part, the colonial administrators are not forewarned, it is their ignorance of local languages and customs and their willingness to place the affairs of the colonial administration in the hands of those whom they erroneously consider their inferiors that they are tricked. The text constructs this dupery as the just deserts of colonial conquest, and more often than not, the conquerors are quite unaware that they have been “served.” The ironic position of the interpreter who often both serves and undermines the colonizer, and who works both on behalf of and against the interests of his fellows therefore finds its fullest illustration in the figure of Wangrin, an (ironic) intercultural trickster translator who plays in the space between opposites. While Wangrin uses his knowledge of traditional rites and customs for his own gain, his very life is nevertheless tied to an ancestral “occult” knowledge that remains hidden from the colonizer. As long as he follows the laws of his ancestors and does what the “hidden forces” tell him to do, he is able to maintain his powerful position as intermediary. It is only when he stops “listening” to one of the “sides” on which he depends to maintain his “balance” that he falls into disfavor and loses his life. Thus, a close reading of Wangrin shows that the traditional cliché, “traduttore, tradittore” does not apply here. This is because, in yet another paradox, Wangrin is shown to be over and again “true to his word,” as are the twists and turns of his destiny, predicted in the first chapter of the book. As one of his protégés puts it, “Wangrin, despite being the king of buffoons, is nevertheless a man of his word, who, aside from his joking, knows how to act courageously and seriously. He always keeps his word.”39

Conclusion As Tejaswini Niranjana demonstrates, under colonialism, to judge a particular text worthy of interpretation and translation is also to deploy a strategy of containment whereby the colonized “other’s” language and cultural practices are brought into being through translation into the colonizer's language, most often with the aim of “knowing” and thereby

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“fixing,” or congealing (3) that culture for the European consumer. Put differently, cultural translation and interpretation ironically add value to the subject culture when it is “carried over” as an object of study by anthropologists and ethnologists. In the particular case of the colonial enterprise in French West Africa, the “carrying over” of the subject culture could not have occurred without native informants/interpreters. As a result, interpreters perform as (ironic) intercultural translators, since the work of interpreting both constitutes and undermines the colonial subject; it is both subservient and oppositional. This is so because by translating “on behalf of” the colonizer, the interpreter helped to make colonial conquest possible. On the other hand, the interpreter also had the power to undermine the colonizer through “unfaithful” translations or other manipulations of the colonial system. In overturning conventional notions of translation as the transparent transfer of meaning from a source text to a target text, the interpreter as ironic trickster also constitutes an oppositional model for the African writer-as-translator who works to redress linguistic and cultural power inequities through a transnational or transcultural mode of writing that plays in the spaces between.40

Notes 1

Aleida Assmann draws on Thomas Mann’s conception of irony to elaborate a theory of intercultural translation in “The Curse and Blessing of Babel; or, Looking Back on Universalisms.” See also Katrina Daly Thomson's "From Hybrid Original to Shona Translation: How A Grain of Wheat Becomes Tsanga Yembeu." 2 See Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility for a through study of this translation model. 3 See André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, and Bassnet and Lefevere, Translating Cultures. The idea that the Author is the authentic origin while the translator is a derivative copier is linked to the view of the author as textual origin, rather than as a site through whom discourses circulate and are rewritten. See Roland Barthes, “La mort de l'Auteur.” Such an idea is not far from an understanding of “orality” as a constant process of recreation in contrast to a view of knowledge as something “figée dans les livres muets" (congealed in dumb books). See D.T. Niane, Sundiata ou l'épopée mandingue. 78-79/ 41. 4 Ricard responds to his own question by arguing that new attention should be paid to Bâ’s work because it has been misread as a progression from Bâ’s mother tongue, Pulaar/Fulfulbe to French. Ricard is interested in examining the tension between Pulaar and French, rather than some sort of evolutionary progression from an African mother tongue to French (152). Regarding Ricard’s seemingly erroneous statement that the majority of Bâ's work was written before 1960, perhaps Ricard is referring to Bâ’s work collecting and translating works of oral literature. L'Etrange destin de Wangrin ou les roueries d'un interprète africain was

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published in 1973 (379 pages), and Bâ’s copious memoirs, Amkoullel, ou l'enfant peul (535 pages) and Oui, Mon Commandant! (516 pages) were published in 1991 and 1994 respectively, with a third volume still unpublished. Furthermore, some works that were translated from an oral medium and cosigned by ethnographers and/or colonial officials were either later revised and republished without a coauthor, such as his Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar, which I discuss below. See Ricard's latest work, Le Sable de Sahel: traduction et apartheid. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2011. 5 “résister au préjugé anthropologique,” “des reliques d'un passé révolu, pour leur valeur documentaire”(188) 6 “en Afrique, lorsque un vieillard meurt, c’est une bibliothèque qui brûle.” There seems to be some confusion regarding the occasion upon which Bâ made this pronouncement. Attributed to his 1960 address to the Africa Commission at the UNESCO General Conference in Paris, Bâ was arguing for the importance of recording Africa's oral traditions, in danger of disappearing under the continuing influence of the West, and especially of France in the era following independence, and was requesting UNESCO assistance to do so. However, Bâ is said in fact to have proclaimed, “Je considère la mort de chacun de ces traditionnalistes comme l'incendie d'un fonds culturel non exploité.” ‘I consider the death of each of these traditionalists to be like the incineration of an untapped archive.’ Other sources assert that the statement was made in an interview between A. H. Bâ and Baba Kaké. The citation is as follows: Writing is one thing and knowledge is another. Writing is the photograph of knowledge, but it is not knowledge itself. Knowledge is a light that is in man; the heritage of what has been transmitted to him. The word IS man. The verb is creative. It maintains humanity in his own nature. Know that in my country, when an old man dies, it is a library that burns. L'écriture est une chose et le savoir en est une autre. L'écriture est la photographie du savoir, mais elle n'est pas le savoir lui-même. Le savoir est une lumière qui est en l'homme; héritage de ce qui lui a été transmis. La parole EST l'homme. Le verbe est créateur. Il maintient l'homme dans sa nature proper. Apprenez que dans mon pays, quand un vieillard meurt, c'est une bibliothèque qui brûle. (Konaté 2005: 58) Bâ defines “orality” as a socio-cultural-historical archive preserved in living memory. When one enters the statement in its French version on an internet search engine, it is still attributed to Bâ, while in its English versions, the statement is vaguely known as an old “African proverb.” 7 “la plus grosse bêtise qui est jamais sortie en Afrique...Parce que tout simplement, on ne peut pas compter sur le pouvoir gérontocratique pour penser le futur...si on ne change pas les mentalités en Afrique, on n’avancera pas. Si on ne règle pas nos rapports avec la tradition, on n’avancera pas.” See Faliou Cissé’s defense of traditional knowledge as embodied in the village elder, or “vieillard,” in “Non, Professeur, tout le monde, sauf vous.” Professor Diouf’s comments were uttered during a conference on the following theme: “Un demi-siècle d’indépendance : bilan et perspective des Etats africains.” I would like to thank Mr Lamine Agba for bringing this statement to my attention.

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L’époque des histoires que racontait la grand-mère grabataire était finie...l’heure était désormais à l'écrit parce que c’est ce qui reste, la parole, c'est de la fumée noire, du pipi de chat sauvage, le patron du Crédit à voyagé n'aime pas les formules toutes faites du genre, ‘en Afrique quand un vieillard meurt, c'est une bibliothèque qui brûle,’ et lorsqu'il entend ce cliché bien développé, il est plus vexé et lance aussitôt, ‘ça dépend de quel vieillard, arrêtez donc vos conneries, je n'ai confiance qu'en ce qui est écrit...” (11-12) 9 “mort de tout vieillard affubulé d'une longue barbe et d'un boubou immaculé en débusquant dans les cendres de sa logorrhée les derniers sursauts d'une bibliothèque en fumé.” In an April, 2012 e-mail communication, however, Waberi writes, “Je pense comme toi que A.H. Bâ est à relire, à redécouvrir... pour eviter les voies du nihilisme, de l’egotisme et du vide que risquent de prendre certains auteurs dits de ma generation.” “Like you, I think that A.H. Bâ should be reread and rediscovered…in order to avoid the routes of nihilism, egotism, and emptiness that some authors of my generation risk taking.” 10 “mémoire prodigieusement fidèle” 11 “en Afrique comme ailleurs, chaque fois qu’un vieillard meurt, ce n’est plus une bibliothèque qui brûle !” December 2013. 12 “Combien de fois des jeunes gens m'ont dit: ‘Monsieur Hampâté Bâ, vous êtes dépassé.’ Je leur ai répondu: ‘Mais c’est vous qui n'êtes pas arrivés.” 13 See for example, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks. African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa, 2006, especially Ralph Austen, “Interpreters SelfInterpreted. The Autobiographies of Two Colonial Clerks.” 14 Space does not permit an analysis of Oui, Mon commandant!, volume two of Bâ’s memoires. 15 I use the masculine pronoun deliberately because men were always the official interpreters. However, much remains to be said about the impact of women as cultural interpreters and translators once they entered into forced “colonial marriages” with white French administrators. Several examples of indigenous women "requisitioned" by colonial administrators for sexual services are found in L’Etrange destin de Wangrin. 16 I visited the French Colonial Archives (COAM-Archives d'Outre Mer) in June, 2011 and asked specifically if there were any documents containing information about indigenous African interpreters in colonial French West Africa. Several of the archivists told me that there were none. I also searched the database of the archives as well as the library holdings, and it was suggested that I visit the French colonial archives in Dakar, Senegal for the possibility of finding the personnel files of indigenous interpreters. According to Ralph Austen, however, the COAM archives do contain the personnel file of Jacques Kouh Moukouri who was an interpreter and clerk in colonial Cameroun. See Austen, “Interpreters SelfInterpreted.” 17 Osborn demonstrates that Boubou Penda, of putative slave descent, rose to an extremely powerful and even abusive position in French Guinea thanks to his association with Noirot.

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In “The Empire Talks Back: Orality, Heteronomy, and the Cultural Turn in Interpretation Studies.” While it is true that Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks. African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa treats some of the issues Cronin raises, it remains one of the only works to do so at this time. 19 “du début jusqu'à la fin en totalité” 20 Indeed African historiography regularly incorporates oral material into the reconstruction of the African past. See Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition as History, (1985). Regarding Bâ's “usefulness” as historical document, see Ralph Austen, “Interpreters Self-Interpreted.” 21 “neutralisé dans sa spécificité et son tumulte propres, renvoyé au folklore et à la vulgate sociologique, à l'univers préhistorique des contes et des legends.” For a thorough analysis of this tendency, see Eileen Julien's African Novels and the Question of Orality. 22 “n’invente rien, il se contente de choisir, parmi les héros et les événements d’un lieu et d’une époque, ceux qui lui paraissent les plus caractéristiques...” 23 “ma formation de ‘traditionaliste’...veut que le transmetteur d’un recit n’y ajoute rien de lui-même, sinon quelques enjolivements de forme” (363). 24 “Lorsque je l’ai rencontré pour la première fois, Wangrin venait d'être momentanément détaché par le commandant auprès d'un commis des Affaires indigènes de passage à Bandiagara, M. François-Victor Equilbecq, qui effectuait une tournée à travers tout le pays pour recueillir le plus grand nombre possible de contes soudanais. Quand M. Equilbecq arriva à Bandiagara en juin, 1912, le commandant de cercle convoqua le chef au nouvel arrivant tous ceux, hommes, femmes, vieillards ou enfants, qui connaissaient les contes. Je figurais parmi les enfants choisis. Chaque conte retenu était payé à l'informateur dix, quinze ou vingt centimes, selon sa longueur ou son importance...Il devait publier une grande partie des contes recuillis en 1913 chez E. Leroux, dans la "Collection des contes et chants populaires,” texte qui sera repris in 1972 par les éditions Maisonneuve et Larose sous le titre Contes populaires d'Afrique occidentale. (Amkoullel 289-90) 25 Au début, Wangrin les traduisait à Mr. Equilbecq, qui prenait des notes. Mais bientôt, ce dernier se déchargea sur lui du soin de receuillir directement la plupart des textes. Wangrin rédigeait une première traduction en français, puis le communiquait à M. Equilbecq, lequel y apportait éventuellement des corrections ou des modifications de son cru... Il n'est pas sans intérêt de savoir que Wangrin en a été l'un des principaux rédacteurs. Son nom est cité au bas de la plupart des contes, précédé de la mention "traduit par" ou "interprété par." Mon nom y figure aussi par endroits… 26 “le plus grand conteur de la boucle du Niger” (7). 27 “Aussi un jour… [Wangrin] me dit: ‘Mon petit Amkoullel, autrefois tu savais conter. Maintenant que tu sais écrire, tu vas noter ce que je conterai de ma vie.” (Wangrin 8/xvii). For a general overview of the relationship between Bâ, Equilbecq, and Wangrin, see Roger Chemain, "L’Enfant peul, L’interprète, et le commis des affaires indigenes." 28 “domestiques, boys, cuisiniers…fonctionnaires subalternes, moniteurs d’enseignement” (Wangrin 367-68, n.10)

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“le refus de se référer à la bibliothèque coloniale, et notamment au corpus de textes portant sur les Peuls, peut s'apercevoir comme une volonté de se détourner du savoir textuel...qui n'avait su déboucher sur une image de l'Afrique qui correspondrait à une conception indigène de la réalité africaine”(204). 30 “s'occuper des questions musulmanes et pour enquêter sur mon compte...Il venait me rendre visite matin et soir...Durant l'année où nous eûmes des entretiens quotidiens, je répondis à toutes ses questions sur les traditions africianes, les religions locales, l'Islam, la voie Tidjani et, en particulier, la pratique tidjanienne dite des “onze grains.” Je remis également au capitaine Cardaire une volumineuse documentation écrite dont une partie était constituée par l'enseignement et les paroles de Tierno Bokar que j'avais receuillis”(9). 31 “la vie de Tierno Bokar et de son enseignement, manuscrit que je remis à Marcel Cardaire en lui faisant totale confiance pour son utilisation.”(9) 32 “procéder à une refonte totale du premier ouvrage et d'en profiter pour le compléter, tout en conservant son plan d'origine”(9). 33 “l’informateur ideal, qui ne ment pas, qui ne commet pas d’impostures, est une denrée rare...les Noirs ont un penchant naturel pour le mensonge et l’imposture...L’informateur exemplaire est celui qui a su s’écarter des changements introduits par la colonization pour se preserver dans sa pureté naturelle...Un genre de menteur qu’il importe de n’utiliser qu’avec circonspection est l’informateur ayant subi l’influence des Européens. Converti à des religions étrangères, recouvert d’un vernis dont il est presque toujours fier, l’indigène évolué...n'est jamais très favorable à l'enquête. On ne peut être à la fois à l'école et au bois sacré.” (cited in Aggarwal, 94) 34 “une clef miraculeuse, un sésame ouvre-toi” (19) 35 “maître en la matière” (296) 36 “le grand confluent des contraires”(21). 37 “hibou qui…accompagne partout le sorcier” (156), “[de] bons Blancs-Noirs” “nègres à moitié européens” (280), “Blanc-Blancs” et “dieux de la brousse conquérants et chefs suprêmes du pays” (336) 38 “Wangrin ne cachait pas qu’il comptait sur Gongoloma-Sooké pour l’inspirer et l’aider quand il déclencherait ce qu’il appelait des ‘affaires carabinées’ où il se trouverait empêtré”(22). 39 “Wangrin, pour être le roi des farceurs, n’en est pas moins un homme de parole qui, blague mise à part, sait agir courageusement et sérieusement. Il tient toujours sa parole” (306-307). 40 In Translation as Reparation, Paul Bandia examines postcolonial African writing as an oppositional hybrid aesthetics whose performance “evokes the art of translation...understood as a transnational or transcultural mode of expression in a multilingual and multicultural context” (30).

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References Aggarwal, Kusum. Amadou Hampâté Bâ et l'africanisme. Paris: L'Harmattan. 1999. Assmann, Aleida. “The Curse and Blessing of Babel; or, Looking Back on Universalisms.” The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Spaces Between. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds. Stanford: Stanford U Press, 1996. 85-100. Austen, Ralph A. "From a Colonial to a Postcolonial Voice: Amkoullel: l'enfant peul." Roundtable on Amadou Hampâté Bâ. Research in African Literatures 31 3 (Fall 2000): 1-17. —. "Interpreters Self-Interpreted. The Autobiographies of Two Colonial Clerks." in Lawrence, Osborn and Roberts. Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks. 159-179. —. “Who Was Wangrin and Why Does it Matter?” MANSA Conference, Lisbon, June 2008. On-line. May 13, 2012. Bâ, Amadou, Hampaté. Amkoullel, l'enfant peul Paris: Actes sud, 1991, 1992. —. Discours de Hamadou Hampâté Bâ à la commission Afrique de l'UNESCO. December 2013. —. L’Etrange destin de Wangrin: ou les roueries d’un interprète africain. Paris: UGE, 1973. —. The Fortunes of Wangrin. Trans. Aina Pavolini Taylor. Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 1999. —. Oui, Mon Commandant! Arles: Actes sud, 1994. —. The Living Tradition. in Joseph Ki-Zerbo, ed., UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. I. 166-203. —. Sur les Traces d’Amkoullel, l’enfant peul. Paris: Actes sud. 1998. Bâ, Amadou, Hampaté, and Marcel Cardaire. Tierno Bokar, le sage de Bandiagara. Paris: Présence africaine, 1957. Bâ, Amadou, Hampaté. Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar le sage de Bandiagara. Paris: Seuil, 1980. Bandia, Paul. Translation as Reparation. Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2008. Barthes, Roland.“La mort de l'Auteur.” Le bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1984. 61-67.

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Bowen, David and Margareta Bowen, Eds. Interpreting: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 1990. Brenner, Louis. “Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Tijâni Francophone.” In JeanLouis Triaud and David Robinson, eds. La Tijâniyya. Une confrérie musulmane à la conquête de l’Afrique. Paris: Kartha, 2000. 289-326. Chanda, Tirthankar. “Les Mémoires réedités d’Amadou Hampâté Bâ.” December 2013. Chemain, Roger. L’Enfant peul, L’interprète, et le commis des affaires indigenes. In Robert Jouanny, ed. Lecture de l’oeuvre d’Hampâté Bâ. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992. 85-91. Cissé, Faliou. "Non, Professeur, tout le monde, sauf vous.” On-line. December 2013. Cronin, Michael. “The Empire Talks Back: Orality, Heteronomy, and the Cultural Turn in Interpretation Studies.” In Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler. Translation and Power. Amherst: U of Massachussetts Press, 2002. 45-62. Delavignette, Robert. Freedom and Authority in French West Africa. London: Cass, 1968. Delisle, Jean and Judith Woodsworth, Eds. Translators Through History. Philadelphia: J Benjamins 1995. Diouf, Mamadou. “La plus grosse bêtise qui est jamais sortie en Afrique, c’est de dire qu’en Afrique quand un vieillard meurt, c’est une bibliothèque qui brûle.” On-line. “http://www.seneweb.com/news/Culture/l-rsquo-historien-mamadoudiouf-recadre-l-rsquo-ecrivain-amadou-hampathe-ba-laquo-la-plusgrosse-betise-qui-est-jamais-sort_n_57699.html” Consulted March 8, 2012. Equilbecq, François. Contes populaires d’Afrique occidentale. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1913; 1972. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Hargreaves, Alec, Charles Forsdick, and Patrick Murphy, eds. Transnational French Studies. Post-colonialism and Littérature-Monde. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

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Irele, Abiola. “Introduction.” The Fortunes of Wangrin. Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 1999. vi-xvi. Julien, Eileen. African Novels and the Question of Orality. Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 1992. Kanté, Adama Aïdara. "L'Historien Mamadou Diouf recadre l'écrivain Amadou Hampaté Bâ." . Konaté, Yacouba. "Le Syndrome Amadou Hampâté Bâ ou comment naissent les proverbs." in Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Homme de Science et de sagesse. Mélanges pour le centième anniversaire de la naissance d'Hampâté Bâ. Eds. Amadou Touré et Ntji Idriss Mariko. Paris: Karthala, 2005. 49-67. Lawrance, Benjamin N., Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts, eds. Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks. African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. "Introduction. African Intermediaries and the "Bargain" of Collaboration." 3-34. Lefevere, André. "Mother Courage's Cucumbers: Text, System, and Refraction in a Theory of Literature." in Venuti, Lawrence, ed. Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Rouledge, 2004. 239-255. . —. Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere (eds). Translation, History and Culture. London and New York: Pinter, 1990. —. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London/New York: Routledge, 1992. Levine, Roger S. “An Interpreter Will Arise. Resurrecting Jan Tzatzoe’s Diplomatic and Evangelical Contributions as a Cultural Intermediary on South Africa’s Eastern Cape Frontier, 1816-1818.” In Lawrence, Osborn, and Roberts. 37-55. Mabanckou, Alain. Verre Cassé. Paris: Seuil, 2005. McClendon, Thomas. “Interpretation and Interpolation: Shepstone as Native Interpreter.” In Lawrence, Osborn, and Roberts. 77-93. Miller, Joseph C., ed. The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History. Folkestone: W. Dawson, 1980. Moudileno, Lydie. "Francophonie: Trash or Recycle?" in Hargreaves, Forsdick, and Murphy, 109-124. Monénembo, Tierno. Le roi de Kahel. Paris: Seuil, 2008. Trans. by Nicholas Elliott as The King of Kahel. Las Vegas, Nevada: AmazonCrossing, 2010. Moura, Jean-Marc. "Textual Ownership in L'Etrange destin de Wangrin (The Fortunes of Wangrin) by Amadou Hampâté Bâ." Research in African Literatures 37 1 (Spring 2006): 91-99.

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Ndiaye, Christiane. “Les mémoires d’Amadou Hampaté Bâ : récit d’un parcours identitaire exemplaire.” In Suzanne Crosta, ed. Récits de vie de l’Afrique et des Antilles. Sainte-Foy, Québec :GRELCA, 1998. 1336. Niane, D.T. Sundiata ou l'épopée mandingue. Paris: Présence africaine, 1960. Trans G.D. Pickett as Sundiata. An Epic of Old Mali. Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1965. (2002). Niang, Anna. "History and Role of Interpreting in Africa." In David Bowen and Margareta Bowen, Eds. Interpreting: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 1990. 34-36. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: California UP, 1992. Osborn, Emily Lynn. “Interpreting Colonial Power in French Guinea: The Boubou Penda-Ernest Noirot Affair of 1905.” In Lawrence, Osborn, and Roberts. 56-76. Pelton, Robert. The Trickster in West Africa. A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. Petterson, Bo. "The Postcolonial Turn in Literary Translation Studies: Theoretical Frameworks Reviewed." AE Canadian Aesthetics Journal/ Revue canadienne d'esthétique. vol. 4 Summer./ Été 1999. Online. December 2013. Ricard, Alain. Littératures d'Afrique noire. Paris: 1995. —. Le Sable de Sahel: traduction et apartheid. Paris: CNS Editions, 2011. Thompson, Katrina Daly. "From Hybrid Original to Shona Translation: How A Grain of Wheat Becomes Tsanga Yembeu." in On the Road to Baghdad, or, Traveling Biculturalism. Theorizing a Bicultural Approach to Centemporary World Fiction. Ed. Gönül Pultar. Washigton, DC: New Academia Publishing, LLC, 2005. 141-165. Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 1995. Waberi, Abdourahman A. "Ecrivains en position d'entraver." in Pour une littérature-monde, eds. Michel Le Bris et Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 67-75. Walker, Sheila S, ed. "Introduction: Are You Hip to the Jive? (Re)Writing/ Righting the Pan-American Discourse" African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas. Lanham, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2001: (1-44).

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Watts, Richard. Packaging Post/coloniality. The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005.

CHAPTER TEN WORLD-IDENTITY IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD: WHAT ROLE(S) FOR FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN NOVELISTS? AWA SARR UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, KNOXVILLE

While it is undeniable that progress in transportation and information and communication technologies have helped to bring people together and infuse them with a growing awareness that they share a global village, it is nonetheless clear that, paradoxically, there is a resurgence of isolationism that alert populists don’t hesitate to opportunistically seize, and exploit to the fullest of its explosive potential. Following the debate on national identity launched in France in 2010, a group of writers including some Francophone African writers of the latest generation,1 have rebelled against the concept of national identity, considered anachronistic, in a book entitled: Je est un autre: pour une identité-monde (I is other: for a world-identity). Originally from Africa but practicing their art for the most part in Western countries, these new Francophone African writers are well positioned in their capacities as artists and immigrants to grasp the aforementioned paradox. Doubly challenged, they advocate and claim for themselves a world-identity that posits that Je est un autre. In this contribution, I will first look at how globalization blurs the notion of identity at the same time it poses a need for identity. Secondly, I will look at the role African writers, mainly novelists, have played in better understanding of the relationship between France and its former colonies, and the role they are currently playing for France’s acceptance of its “world-identity”—an event that will necessary require a decentralization of a certain static French “national identity.”

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Genesis of the Concept of World-Identity On March 16, 2007 forty-four French-language writers signed in Le Monde, a French newspaper, a manifesto entitled “For a World Literature in French.” In this manifesto, the writers announced the “birth of a world literature in French consciously assertive on the world” that would no longer establish a distinction between a French literature produced by French-born writers, and a Francophone literature whose authors are at the intersection of several cultures. The distinction barely hides indeed, a centralized French literature that rejects to the margins the so-called Francophone literature. The promoters of world literature in French are firm in their belief that literature “cannot be squeezed into borders,” “and that the advent of world literature in French signs the death certificate of a Francophonie that no one speaks or writes.”2 Much has been written about the manifesto and the collection of essays that followed its publication; a controversy on which I do not wish to dwell. What is of interest here is that, three years after the launch of world literature in French, the leading signatories of the manifesto advance the concept of world-identity in opposition to a national identity. In the same way they had seized upon the allocation of five literary awards to non-French writers in the Fall of 2007 to publish the manifesto, a majority of the signatories use the “great debate” on French national identity as a pretext to produce in 2010 a second collection of essays, Je est un autre: pour une identité monde (Le Bris and Rouaud 2010). In line with the main argument of the manifesto and the first collection of essays titled Pour une littérature-monde (Le Bris and Rouaud 2007), the contributors to Je est un autre: pour une identité-monde ponder on the current prioritization of the world and of identities and the needed deprioritization that should take place soon. They particularly discuss exclusions that minorities suffer in different places around the world while reexamining at the same time the concept of identity to denounce isolationism, and to suggest the more inclusive concept of world-identity. So, if chronologically the debate was first centered on the marginalization of francophone literature by the French literary institution, it goes without saying that the relegation to the background of those whose identity is not believed to be “truly” French—“the Francophones”—is more fundamental in the sense that it clarifies the debate on French versus Francophone literature. This is to say that the opposition between French identity and “Francophone” identity precedes and grounds the opposition between French literature and Francophone literature. By reflecting on the concept of identity and proposing that of world-identity, the contributors to Le Bris

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and Rouand’s latest collection went from a narrowly-defined debate to engage in a wider, more universal one intended to reflect on the shared destiny of humankind in a world undergoing profound changes.

The Paradox of Globalization Through the development of trade and the free movement of goods, capital and people, globalization, which was made possible by the rapid development of transportation and extraordinary advances in information technologies and communications, has promoted migration, contributed to the emergence of a “common culture,” and by the increase in standards of living that it promotes, has also led to a greater demand by the public for environmental quality and a common awareness that, with only one planet, all humans are in the same boat and must face together the announced climate crises. However, globalization has not only unifying effects. The fierce competition waged between companies and states inevitably leads to a competition between workers, social dumping and increased inequality between and within states. Weak states are marginalized and must follow multinational corporations and international institutions that dictate their own laws. Moreover, it instils an ever-increasing insecurity within an evergrowing number of disoriented people, and stirs antagonisms between cultural identities. Indeed, the advent of nation-states, first in Europe and then almost everywhere else has given birth to a well-partitioned and “ghettoized” world. Each nation-state has jealously guarded its borders and done its best to distinguish between its people and its enemies, between insiders and outsiders while striving to forge a national identity intended as a unifying and stabilizing factor capable of creating and maintaining the homogeneity of the group. To a certain degree, this is still true, but globalization has somewhat shaken this world order. People and things are crossing borders more than ever before, but globalization has this particularity that while on the one hand it allows a decompartmentalization and opening of the world, bringing people of different cultures, languages or value systems together, it instigates, on the other hand, a resurgence of isolationism. The more people from different backgrounds are in contact, the more they seem to seek to distinguish themselves. And more than ever, states are preoccupied with building borders and erecting walls. Martin Storti and Jacques Tarnero take note of this paradox in the following terms:

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Chapter Ten “The globalization of trade and communication systems, the ongoing standardization of lifestyles coexists with a great rise in the search for roots. Being daily in contact with distant places doesn’t mean they become more familiar; on the contrary, they become more foreign, without losing their threatening character. There is this need to protect oneself from those places simultaneously so far away and so close; there is the need to recover what is so near but is drifting away. The fear of losing one’s territory, one’s personality, one’s difference, one’s identity is everywhere.” 3

France’s National Identity Crisis According to Julia Kristeva, France is in a period of psychological depression. Like individuals, Kristeva writes, nations are also susceptible to suffer from this disease. The causes as well as the symptoms are similar in both individuals and the nation. A narcissistic injury, an absence of ideals or social distress can all be root causes of depression and a depressed person or nation isolates himself, unwinding all relationships. France, Kristeva writes, is suffering a national depression, similar to the ones individuals can endure. We don’t see ourselves as the great power that De Gaulle had re-conquered anymore: France’s voice is less and less audible, she struggles to win in European negotiations and even more when competing with America. Migration flows have created the difficulties we know and a more or less justified feeling of insecurity or persecution has set in. […] The country in this context does not react differently than a depressed patient. The first reaction of the depressed is to isolate himself: he locks himself up at home, does not leave his bed, does not talk, and complains.4

Kristeva seems to include immigration as one of the causes of France’s depression, but is this really the case? The question is debatable. What is not debatable, however, is that the hostility towards immigrants needs to be understood as a manifestation, an effect, of one of the symptoms of France’s depression. As Kristeva points out, politically, France no longer has the feeling of being a great power, a great nation, and American global supremacy, the unification of Europe and the collapse of France’s colonial empire have probably something to do with the feeling. Regarding the last point, it is interesting to note that there has been a proliferation of studies on the country’s colonial past in recent years at the same time disconcerting acts from the highest levels of the state were observed.5 Many Africans writers did not hesitate to qualify these acts and discourses as a tentative resurrection of colonialism. To denounce it, they published numerous

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articles in various newspapers, a book, and a collection of short stories. In the introductory note to the short stories evocatively titled: Dernières nouvelles du colonialism (“The Latest News/Short Stories on Colonialism” with the word play on “nouvelles”), Patrice Nganang under whose leadership the book was compiled explicitly identifies the reason behind the will to resurrect the colonial past as nothing less than a desperate tentative by France to recover its supposedly lost grandeur: “France has decided to strut once more in the halo of its empire, because it’s hard to be a second-tier country”6, he writes. This question of lost grandeur is certainly not France’s only national identity crisis problem. Economically, the country is dealing, like many other countries, with the negative effects of globalization. Its population is suffering from mass unemployment, continuous jobs losses, and a growing decline in purchasing power. It is known that there is a correlation between economic downfalls and growing intolerance towards immigrants. For instance, the belief that France’s immigrant population had reached an excessive number started circulating around the eighties, during the oil crisis. It was in 1974, one year after the 1973 oil crisis, that President Giscard d’Estaing ended the French immigration policy of the trente glorieuses. It was also in 2008, the year of the world’s biggest economic crisis since the thirties, that Brice Hortefeux who led President Sarkozy’s Ministry of Immigration and National Identity until January 2009 expressed his pride for having deported 29,796 people instead of the 28, 000 target set earlier that year. The political and economic declines mentioned above undoubtedly contribute to a great deal of France’s national identity crisis. One telling manifestation of this crisis was the “great debate” to which the French were invited in January 2010 by the Minister of National Identity and Immigration, Eric Besson—a ministry whose creation and very title were controversial. Participants were invited to answer the following questions: “For you, what does it mean to be French today?” and “What is the contribution of immigration to our national identity?”7 This debate mainly reveals that France has the reflexes of a person who feels in danger and seeks protection. This fear in turn fuels the resurgence of isolationism that manifests itself through growing hostility towards immigrants and their descendants. Indeed politically and economically weak, a depressed France does not hesitate to blame immigrants and their descendants for causing its degeneration and impoverishment. As René Girard once said, often, when confronted with difficulties, human beings resort to scapegoats to convince themselves that all their problems have but one easily identifiable and fixable cause.

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The contributors to the collection: Je est un autre: pour une identitémonde invited themselves into the national identity debate by telling Besson that to discuss the essence of France’s national identity as well as its immigrant population, even if it is in order to assess immigrants’ contribution to national identity, is greatly disturbing and nothing less than an attempt to stigmatize immigrants. We have to agree with Michel Le Bris that if there is debate in France over national identity, which inevitably turns into a debate on immigration, it is because France is “sick with its colonial history,” its universalism has been unable to integrate it since the beginning. The Republican model is in crisis, perhaps out of breath, it certainly has no hold on reality, but is prisoner of its myths, it refuses to admit it […] because more and more people see on a daily basis the illusory nature of the founding article of the constitution according to which France is an indivisible, secular, and democratic, and ensures the equality of all citizens and respects all beliefs.8

Indeed, in the name of the Republic, supposedly egalitarian, flagrant discriminatory acts towards minorities and immigrants are ignored in France. The state adheres to the theory that all citizens are equal before the law and stigmatizes the “communitarianism” of those whose skin color, religion, cultural values or parental origin expose to the indifference or wrath of the “truly” French. In these times of globalization, the situation is very questionable. To get out of the identity crisis, people need a total change in the way they think. Instead of thinking in terms of stable categories like nation-state, territory, borders, us and them, Le Bris writes, they should think in terms of “flows instead of structures.” Instead of “dividing, selecting, classify and prioritizing, seeking at any cost to hide from humanity those we despise, who are not like us or with whom we think we don’t have, at first glance, anything in common,” it would better to recognize everybody’s humanity, adds Achille Mbembe.9 France is “at the crossroads of multiple identities.” It has a worldidentity or what Le Bris refers to also as “une identité-mille feuilles.” However, in general, it seems as if France refuses to critically and objectively think of colonization and its perpetuation in order to incorporate them into its history for the advent of a system of integration not refractory to differences. In recent years, historians, sociologists, but also writers have been calling for the “decolonization of the imaginary” (decolonisation de l’imaginaire) and have been suggesting more appropriate ways to our world of understanding and using concepts such as nation or identity. A world-identity is at odds with a national identity in

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that it does not seek to persecute others but instead tries to be acquainted with as many others as possible. African writers involved in this fight for the advent of a nondiscriminatory world-identity are perpetuating a tradition born out of other struggles in other periods that remain relevant.

Contribution of African Novelists to the French Identity Crisis debate Since the negritude movement, Francophone African literature has been a privilege space for the reaffirmation of the humanity and identity of people of African descent. This tradition is superbly summarized by Ahmadou Kourouma in his preface to Mongo-Mboussa’s Désir d’Afrique: We write the literature of a guilty conscience, the literature of a European and French guilty conscience. They (Westerners) are abolitionists and we constantly whisper to their ears that they were unrepentant slave owners. They are anticolonialists and we constantly whisper in their ears that they were abominable colonialists. They are democrats and we constantly whisper to their ears that they installed and nurtured in our continent, during the Cold War, bloody dictatorships. They are antiracists and we constantly whisper in their ears that our brothers who live with them are subjected to vexatious exclusions.10

If slavery, colonization and the neocolonial act of harboring dictators are in the past tense, the discrimination of Africans is in the present tense. In other words, the difficulties African immigrants and their descendants are facing in France is but the latest stage in an unsettling continuum where the African appears as the undesirable, objectifiable Other. In light of Kourouma’s formulation, it would be wrong to say that Africans write a literature of “victimization”—a term easily wielded to silence and paralyze those who have everything to gain in talking—but it is clear that African literature bears the marks of a particularly violent reality in which present discrimination might appear the least outrageous but, all the same, in need of being addressed and circumvented. It also may seem that Francophone African writers merely write back to France and is mainly anticolonialist. This is of course not the case; Africans writers do address other topics beside colonialism and neocolonialism. And even if their literature was radically anticolonial at times, the criticisms of the new generation of Francophone African writers are different from the anticolonialism of their predecessors. In Francophone Africa, Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence published in 1968 was the first novel to mitigate the virulence of its

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criticisms towards France. After some years of independence and no significant transformation in Africa, the time had come to recognize that in all that had happened to the continent, Africans had their share of responsibility. Beyond even this desire to be impartial, new Francophone African novelists are trying to avoid the pitfalls of the binary opposition of us versus them. There is indeed a relationship between the development of the novel—particularly realistic novels—and nationalism. According to Timothy Brennan “it was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of European nations by objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles.”11 It should be clarified though that nationalism can take different forms and have different effects. If, for instance, many European nationalisms were primarily motivated by a desire to unite a nation, a unity that was unfortunately going to be based on the conquest and enslavement of other peoples, the nationalism of many former colonies was the expression of the desire to unite communities that colonial occupations did not allow; therefore, “nationalism has different effects and meanings in a peripheral nation than in a world power.”12 The new Francophone African writers that signed the May manifesto and contributed to Le Bris and Rouaud’s collections denounce French nationalism and call for an opening up, a decentralization of the Republic and the inclusion of its multiple identities.

Conclusion Tracing the origins of world literature in French, the authors of the May 2007 manifesto inform us that their desire to rediscover the world, to rediscover the power of a world literature is concomitant with the collapse of grand narratives. The beginning of isolationism in Europe in general, and France in particular, can be dated to the same period. It occurs as a boomerang when the distances that separate us are more imaginary than real, when the world has never been so integrated. This paradox is easily explained when one considers that differences are never as sharp as when they tend to fade. The need to posit one’s identity, to affirm one’s belonging to a community and to strengthen its internal cohesion can lead insidiously to the identification of enemies. The concept of identity-world warns us against this risk and invites us to think that “Je est un autre.” A concept all the more relevant given that in this new millennium the world is going through several crises and the challenges are vital and must transcend historical, political, or any other divisions. Indeed, if the globalization of trade is conducive to isolationism or economic, social and

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environmental crises that are threatening to endanger the future of humans on earth, it should also provide the opportunity to come together in order to face the common threats. Instead of a divisive nationalism, contributors to the collection: Je est un autre: pour une identite-monde, advocate for a more open and just world. By examining the relationship between former colonizers and former colonized, contributors also show how the colonial past is “hauntological”: it is not a closed chapter but a trauma to be exorcised and “to get out of the dark night,” to borrow the title of one of Achilles Mbembe’s books. France needs to decolonize itself instead of continuing to promote a universalism that is not in conformity with the evolution and the challenges of our time.

Notes 1

The New Generation of Francophone Africans writers was born after the colonial period. 2 La littérature “n’est pas compressible dans des frontières” et son avènement “signe l’acte de décès de la francophonie que personne ne parle, ni n’écrit.” 3 “La mondialisation des échanges économiques et des communications, la standardisation en cours des styles de vie coexistent avec une formidable remontée de la quête des origines, de la recherche des racines. L'ailleurs quand il devient visuellement quotidien, ne se rapproche pas, il s'éloigne. Sans perdre pour autant son caractère menaçant. II faut se protéger de ce lointain si proche, il faut retrouver ce proche qui s'éloigne. La peur de perdre son territoire, sa personnalité, sa différence, son identité est partout.” Storti and Tarnero, introduction to L’Identité Française. 4 “Au-delà des individus, la France vit une dépression nationale, analogue à celles de personnes privées. Nous n’avons plus l’image de grande puissance que de Gaulle avait reconquise : la voix de la France se laisse de moins en moins entendre, elle a du mal à s’imposer dans les négociations européennes et encore moins dans la compétition avec l’Amérique. Les flux migratoires ont créé les difficultés que l’on sait, et un sentiment plus ou moins d’insécurité, voire de persécution, s’installe. […] Le pays dans ce contexte ne réagit pas autrement qu’un patient déprimé. La recréation première du déprimé est de se retirer : on s’enferme chez soi, on ne sort pas de son lit, on ne parle pas, on se plaint.” Kristeva, Contre la dépression nationale, 67. 5 Among other things we can note: the February 23 law adopted by the parliament in 2005; President Sarkozy's Dakar speech in July 2007; the contested definition of the words “colonize” and “colonization” in the 2007 edition of Le Petit Robert. 6 “La France a décidé de se pavaner une fois de plus dans l’auréole de son Empire, parce qu’elle a du mal à être un pays de second rang.” Nganang, Dernières nouvelles du colonialisme, 8. 7 “Pour vous, qu’est-ce qu’être français aujourd’hui?” “Quel est l’apport de l’immigration à l’identité nationale?”

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“son universalisme républicain se trouve incapable de l’intégrer, et cela depuis l’origine. Le modèle républicain est en crise, peut-être à bout de souffle, en tous cas sans plus de prise sur le réel, mais prisonnière de ses mythes, elle se refuse à l’admettre […] parce que de plus en plus de gens vivent au quotidien le caractère illusoire de l’article fondateur de la constitution selon lequel la France serait une République indivisible, laïque et démocratique, assurant l’égalité devant la loi de tous les citoyens, et respectant toutes les croyances.” Le Bris and Rouaud, Je est un autre : pour une identité-monde, 21-2. 9 “L’on aura beau ériger des frontières, construire des murs, des digues et des enclos, diviser, sélectionner, classifier et hiérarchiser, chercher à retrancher de l’humanité ceux et celles que l’on méprise, qui ne nous ressemble pas ou avec lesquels nous pensons que nous n’avons, à première vue, rien en commun—il n’y a qu’un seul monde et nous en sommes tous les ayant-droits.” Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit : essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée, 116. 10 “Nous écrivons une littérature d’une mauvaise conscience, la littérature de la mauvaise conscience de l’Occident et de la France. Ils (les Occidentaux) sont antiesclavagistes et sans cesse nous leur murmurons à l’oreille qu’ils ont été d’impénitents esclavagistes. Ils sont anticoloniales et sans cesse nous leur murmurons à l’oreille qu’ils ont été d’abominables colonialistes. Ils sont des démocrates et sans cesse nous leur murmurons à l’oreille qu’ils ont installé et soigné chez nous, pendant la guerre froide, les dictatures sanguinaires. Ils sont antiracistes et sans cesse nous leur murmurons à l’oreille que nos frères qui vivent chez eux sont soumis à des exclusions vexatoires.” 11 Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 49. 12 During, “Literature: Nationalism’s Other? The Case for Revision,” in Nation and Narration., ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 139.

References Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire. La Fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage coloniale. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. During, Simon. “Literature: Nationalism’s Other? The Case for Revision.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. Girard, René. La Violence et le sacré. Paris: Grasset, 1974. Kourouma, Ahmadou. Préface. Désir d’Afrique. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Kristeva, Julia. Contre la dépression nationale. Paris: Les Editions Textuel, 1998. Le Bris, Michel. “Lisez Rimbaud !” Je est un autre: pour une identitémonde. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.

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Liauzu, Claude, ed. Dictionnaire de la colonisation française. Paris: Larousse, 2007. Mabanckou, Alain. “Le Sang, le sol, la souche.” Je est un autre : pour une identité-monde. Paris : Gallimard, 2010. Mbembe, Achille. Sortir de la grande nuit: essai sur l’Afrique décolonisé. La Découverte, 2010. Nganang, Patrice et al. Dernières nouvelles du colonialisme. La Roque D’Anthéron: Vents d’Ailleurs, 2006. Stortie, Martine and Jacques Tarnero.Eds. L’Identité française. Paris: Editions Tierce, 1985.

CHAPTER ELEVEN SHANTY-TOWNS AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE COLONIAL URBAN ORDER IN ALGIERS AND CASABLANCA JIM HOUSE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

Introduction Late-colonial Algeria and Morocco were characterized by unprecedented social, cultural and political change. Nowhere could these transformations be more acutely observed than in the two main cities, Casablanca and Algiers, very much the showpieces of colonial rule in North Africa, if not the French imperial space more generally. After 1945, internal migration of a scale and speed unheard of in North African history fundamentally transformed both cities’ urban dynamics (Berque: 1958): such migration hence represents an essential–albeit understudied–chapter in the narrative of decolonization. This essay examines the complexity of these processes from two different, but complementary perspectives. Firstly, the analysis focuses on the colonial “gazes” of European academics, urban planners and military officers in Algiers and Casablanca, who were encouraged by the colonial authorities to study the urban poor, increasingly imagined as a political threat after 1945. This gaze was cast on a range of physical spaces, but often exemplified by the growing shanty-town phenomenon that symbolized internal migration, urbanization and a housing crisis. Shanty-towns—on which this essay focuses—proved particularly disruptive of the colonial order: for in addition to offering political resistance, such areas were undergoing intense socio-economic and cultural change, and their inhabitants displayed shifting identities that were difficult for analysts and the authorities to “name” according to existing terms such as “tradition” and “modernity,” categories themselves intimately linked to the colonial project.

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A second approach, that “from below,” discusses some of the strategic appropriations and pragmatic adoption that Moroccans and Algerians in both cities made of imported cultural, social and political practices such as cinema, clothing, scouting, sports and trades unions. This essay argues that to understand the shanty-towns, we need to examine the wider urban landscape with which shanty-town residents were in contact, and where many of these newer forms of urban sociability were located. Indeed, this was a period when the micro-level of neighbourhood was increasingly connected to wider urban, regional, national, and international networks and imaginaries. In this sense, the history of the colonial city cannot be reduced to the story of the “interaction” between Europeans and (here) Algerians and Moroccans: it is also the history of the dynamic encounter between fellow Algerians / Moroccans in constantly evolving new city spaces, albeit in conditions profoundly informed by the colonial situation. Colonial cities are not simply “laboratories” of colonial governance and its deployment, they are also sites—physical and imagined—that North Africans increasingly appropriated for themselves (Balandier 2002), as mass nationalist movements seized the initiative immediately before and after the Second World War. As we shall see, Algiers and Casablanca were not identical, the latter in particular not experiencing war-time refugee migrations. However, the processes underway in both cities nonetheless arguably anticipate upon many subsequent discussions in France and the francophone world regarding the nature of shifting, fluid identifications and crossfertilizations: as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler argue; “it does us no service to reify a colonial moment of binary oppositions so that we can enjoy the postcolonial confidence that our world today is infinitely more complicated, more fragmented and more blurred” (Cooper and Stoler 1997: 9).

Rural-Urban Migration and its Social and Historical Context Migration to both Algiers and Casablanca from the early 1920s onwards was primarily caused by unequal socio-economic development between city and countryside. Crushing poverty and cyclical famines were the key factors, encouraging migration as a survival strategy. In Casablanca, a more sustained process of industrialization created greater job opportunities than in Algiers: in both cities, however, urbanization occurred without industrialization bringing full employment (Descloîtres, Reverdy, Descloîtres 1961; Adam 1972).

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Migration re-shaped both cities: between 1936 and 1952, the Muslim Arab-Berber population of Casablanca increased more than three-fold. By November 1953 there were some 130,000 people in Casablanca’s shantytowns since the Old Medina—like the Algiers Casbah—could no longer contain new arrivals. In Algiers, at least one third of the Muslim ArabBerber population lived in shanty-towns by 1954, a percentage that would significantly increase thereafter due to the war for independence. As David Prochaska says: “a colonial city is the concrete manifestation, the form which colonialism takes in an urban environment” (1990: 13). In both cities, a serious housing problem emerged since, before the early 1950s, the ruling European minorities refused to fund social housing to accommodate these new-comers, nor indeed the poorly-housed longer-term indigenous residents, many of whom also lived in shantytowns. Migration also re-drew the ethnic balance in the city, producing a demographic predominance of Muslim Arab-Berbers over Europeans, the latter feeling increasingly threatened: in Casablanca, the authorities had already relocated the shanty-towns to the suburbs during the 1930s and 1940s, creating two—Ben M’sƯk and Carrières centrales—of approximately forty-five thousand inhabitants each (Adam 1949; House 2012). In Algiers, however, no shanty-town housed over twenty-thousand inhabitants and they were more dispersed across city and suburbs (Descloîtres, Reverdy, Descloîtres 1961). This physical, quantitative displacement in the form of migration to the cities was accompanied by a second, qualitative displacement that was at once spatial, symbolic, cultural and political in nature (Carlier 2009; Cerych 1964). This situation occurred once the main nationalist organizations, notably the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Freedoms (MTLD, 1946-54), then National Liberation Front (FLN, 1954-) in Algiers, and the IstiqlƗl (Independence) Party (1944-) in Morocco became mass movements. Such a process involved these movements reaching out from the traditional bases in Casablanca’s Old Medina or the Algiers Casbah, and from districts having emerged during the interwar years such as the extensive New Medina (Derb Sultan) in Casablanca and ethnically mixed areas such as Belcourt in Algiers, to include wider urban and semi-urban poor areas, of which the shanty-towns (Rivet 2002; Carlier 2009; Çelik 1997). In response to this perceived social and political threat, local and central colonial authorities elaborated a reformist as well as repressive agenda in the guise of welfare colonialism: shanty-towns hence became key sites for intervention. In order to act, the colonial state first needed to

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“know,” producing a new wave of studies after 1945, and which, alongside academic writing, forms the basis of the corpus analysed here. Naturally, such works necessitate an understanding of the colonial conditions that enabled them. In Morocco, the key text after 1945 was Robert Montagne’s highly influential Birth of the Moroccan Proletariat (1950) synthesizing the existing writing on the Protectorate’s urban poor: these studies were often produced by military officials from the Delegation for Urban Affairs (DAU, 1947-) that oversaw the political control of urban space. There was therefore a close link between the social sciences and the colonial project. Similarly in Algiers, the interest in the shanty-towns after 1945 stemmed from the evolving political context. However, politically speaking, we find a broader range of sources than for Casablanca. Of key importance were Algiers Mayor Jacques Chevallier’s re-housing initiatives between 1953 and 1958, followed by De Gaulle’s ambitious Constantine Plan from 1958. Furthermore, as in Casablanca, a modernizing ethos shaped re-housing plans: it was hoped that a built environment along European lines would facilitate Algerians’ adoption of Western values and behaviour (Çeylik 1997: 123-33). Indeed, it was for the Algiers City Planning Agency, created under Chevallier’s tenure, from which Robert Descloîtres, Jean-Claude Reverdy and Claudine Descloîtres worked: this role enabled them to provide an overview of the shanty-towns (1961), and other, more detailed and sociologically sophisticated case studies.1 This work, rather like the betterknown studies of Pierre Bourdieu and his collaborators, was often critical of colonial policy, albeit more indirectly so (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964; Darbel, Rivet, Seibel, Bourdieu 1963). The “Battle of Algiers” (1957) saw the army increasingly interested in the shanty-towns, with the creation the same year of the Urban Administrative Sections (SAU) as part of the fight against the FLN. This produced a different body of “knowledge”: not unlike the Casablanca DAU staff, the SAU officers implemented both reform and repression and some, like their DAU colleagues, had been trained in ethnography.

Studying the Gaze Several key themes re-occur within all but the most radically anticolonial French writing on the urban poor, in general, and the shantytowns in particular. Firstly, a modernizing, normative, developmental meta-narrative informed such analyses: urbanization was to lead to “acculturation”: indeed, colonial migrations could be positively viewed

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from such a perspective. The evaluation of social and cultural practices within indigenous Muslim Arab-Berber societies was situated on a scale of distance to proximity in relation to dominant French values, and couched in terms of a desired transition from “tradition” to “modernity.” Here, considerable cross-fertilization existed with other writing on rural-urban migrations, and economic modernization, from within wider sociological and ethnographical traditions (Tipps 1973). Yet such assumptions were modulated by the North African colonial context (Lucas and Vatin 1975). In contrast, few analysts considered that the Arab-Berber presence in the city could influence the Europeans. Secondly, some studies portrayed the shanty-towns as problematic since they were supposedly hermetically sealed off from the outside world, their inhabitants living a marginalized existence amongst their own extended family units and therefore not undergoing the desired influence of “contact” with the wider city (Descloîtres, Reverdy, Descloîtres 1961: 13-22; Descloîtres, Descloîtres and Reverdy 1962). The shanty-town in this sense was seen to hinder “integration”: for the colonial authorities, rehousing could undermine established socio-cultural practices viewed as offering “deep” resistance to French rule. Yet residential segregation did not necessarily mean total sociocultural or political isolation that contemporary studies often exaggerated, generalizing from specific case studies. Indeed, tension existed between on the one hand, the colonial authorities’ desire to compartmentalize and segregate residential from industrial and commercial zones and, on the other, the reality that the city—as experienced by the economically-active colonized—involved circulation for economic and social means. Consequently, local residents developed a comparative experiential knowledge of ethnic segregation and inequality due to the close spatial proximity of more comfortable housing: like migration, the urban experience is fundamentally comparative. However, some official studies, particularly in Casablanca, did in fact register these trends, highlighting the problems in undertaking political surveillance (for example) when shanty-town dwellers used complex patterns of social interaction between their areas and workplace, the wider city, and their regions of origin (Maneville: 1950). Thirdly, we find no consensus amongst French observers regarding how to describe the shanty-town residents, whose shifting identities implicitly subverted the standard contemporary analytical terms: this uncertainty regarding how to name arguably reflects the significant limits to the “inter-cultural” project of colonial governance informed by urban

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ethnography and sociology and the inability of its attempts at ‘total control’ of urban space. For in terms of socio-economic categorization, the majority of shantytown dwellers were judged not to correspond to the well-established, Western figure of the (male) industrial worker / proleterian (ouvrier, prolétaire). There were many poor, but there was not a “real” working class, or this class was deemed to represent only a small minority of the shanty-town dwellers. For many authors, this lead to a perceived absence of socio-economic integration into the city for newcomers especially, which, in addition to existing family and regional ties, stopped them participating in new urban identities and reinforced the image of the shanty-towns as a marginalized space (Torres 1954; Descloîtres, Reverdy, Descloîtres 1961). At best, the term neo-proletariat (néo-prolétariat) might be employed. More often, however, subproleterians (sous-prolétaires) was used, the latter referring to the unemployed or underemployed, categories that could often be found in the shanty-town even more than in other city districts. The most well-known position is now that of Pierre Bourdieu and his collaborators (Bourdieu 2008; Darbel, Rivet, Seibel, Bourdieu: 1963). For Bourdieu, the absolute poverty faced by many newcomers to Algiers—migrants and, increasingly war refugees—disenabled any revolutionary potential amongst the subproletariate who lived a largely hand-to-mouth existence. Here, Bourdieu dissented from Frantz Fanon, the latter having championed the role of the “lumpen-proletariat” as a revolutionary force alongside the Algerian peasantry.2 Similarly, there was a frequently-expressed judgement in both cities that we could no longer speak of peasants, and that there had been an erosion of “traditional” social, cultural and religious values in the context of migration. For Bourdieu and Sayad (1964), this had been part of a more general and longer-term erosion of indigenous society caused by colonization and then accelerated by the war. In turn, many analysts found that the extent and rapidity of rural-urban migration had exceeded the capacity of the local urban elites to integrate migrants (Berque 1958). Consequently, and albeit from a wide variety of political positions, we see the figure of the shanty-town dweller as an anomic, dysfunctional, deracinated and hence “incomplete” and marginalized individual who fitted neither category of peasant nor industrial worker, and was often symbolized by the subproletarian. This was the figure of the ni-ni, the “neither-nor,” seen to be defined more by what they were no longer (peasants), or by what they had yet to become (urban workers and hence urbanites), than by any instantly recognizable social identity.3 This reading stemmed from contemporary analyses of the consequences of cultural

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interaction and change (Martín-Criado 2008: 70-71; Lucas and Vatin 1975: 65-76; Tipps 1973). Welfare colonialism was designed precisely to step into this breach, since Durkheimian anomie, it was surmised, resulted from underdevelopment (Lucas and Vatin 1975: 69-72): the political imaginary of the colonial administration, various reformists, and the Right saw both Communism and pro-independence nationalism as being potentially able to provide alternative social frameworks for these “uprooted,” viewed as being buffeted between different social worlds. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the only clear “identity” that most shantydwellers were judged to possess was often that of being impossible to define, and of existing in a sort of “in-betweeness” between the poles of countryside / city, peasant / worker, and tradition / modernity informed by the dualist modernizing narrative already outlined: such poles were often presented as necessarily antagonistic and incompatible (Lucas and Vatin 1975: 65-76). Contemporary analysts viewed complexity through the lens of duality, tensions and irreconcilability, highlighting the unequal and problematic co-existence of what were seen as opposites being uncomfortably combined. Consequently, writers often used terms such as “incoherence,” “ambivalence,” “ambiguity” and “juxtaposition” to describe what they saw.4 Bourdieu and Sayad, for example, spoke of the “cultural pidgin” (sabir culturel) of rural-urban migrants resulting from what these authors called the “interferences” and “contradictions” of their diminished peasant condition in the urban environment (1964: 168). Yet not all authors were quite so pessimistic: the optimists often came from the more reformist, rather than most critical readers of the colonial system. For some, the problem of how to define shanty-town dwellers was simply the logical consequence of the new situations being produced by accelerated migration and urbanization: “The difficulty we have in defining them perhaps shows their profoundly original nature and that it is impossible to assign them to the prevailing norms of reference...shantytowns do not simply repeat something previously seen but are a new creation” (Descloîtres, Reverdy, Descloîtres 1961: 26).5 Studies of Casablanca also raised these problems of definition and the new socio-cultural identities found in the shanty-towns: for example, Ladislav Cerych self-reflexively attempted moving beyond binary categorizations: “cultural contact” in the cities, Cerych argued, had led to “something more than mixing or juxtaposition: it’s a fusion into a distinctive new whole” (Cerych 1964: 370-1).6 Analyses of individual shanty-towns generally better accounted for such complexity, since the case-study approach implicitly highlighted each

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shanty-town’s unique combination of regional migration, gender, generational, socio-economic and cultural profiles, and proportion of longer-established city residents alongside newcomers.7 Used by some contemporary writers, the term rurbans (rurbains) was designed to go beyond such problems of definition, and to show previously unseen social and cultural identities, the stress being on the syncretism thus created between the rural and the urban—without necessarily removing the dualism of poles between which such identities were viewed to exist (Carlier 1995: 19). Certainly, migration to the cities did not mean the relinquishing of all or indeed many of the ties with home communities: shanty-town dwellers displayed an ability to constantly renegotiate such links, in part, no doubt, because some shanty-town dwellers themselves came from rural or semi-urban contexts where considerable exposure to outside influences had taken place, often through longstanding patterns of migration within Algeria or beyond. Naturally, however, rural-urban ties nonetheless were also undergoing a process of change, and also depended on, amongst other factors, the temporary or permanent nature of the migration, the conditions in which it took place, the length of time since migration, and the mix of “migrant generations” with varying knowledge of and links to the wider city. Politically, also, the nationalists in both cities sought to exploit such links to monitor arrivals of new-comers into the city, and by using the local assemblies of elders partially transplanted into the shanty-town context. However, lasting ties with the countryside, and strong forms of sociability within the space of the shanty-town, did not necessarily preclude a simultaneous process of becoming accustomed to city life, although the picture here, as elsewhere, was complex. For Reverdy, the shanty-town could function as a “bridge” between city and countryside, with the shanty-town constituting a transitional space, rather than reproducing “traditional” identities (Reverdy 1963: 13). Migration is always transformative of socio-cultural values: some authors spoke of the “partial reconstruction” in the shanty-towns of premigratory social structures and cultural practices (Descloîtres, Descloîtres and Reverdy 1962: 227). Simultaneously, new social elites in the shantytowns such as shopkeepers, hostel owners, and public writers—all of whom played important roles in on-site sociability—also emerged: this change often coincided with the former primacy of older generations giving way to younger men (Descloîtres, Descloîtres and Reverdy 1962: 223). Furthermore, while the regrouping of those from the same regions often took place within the shanty-towns, like the workplace, and many

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other places of sociability, all shanty-towns saw the co-existence of people from different regions, which may have aided national consciousness. Finally, and at a more fundamental level, we can see how the shantytowns provided a window onto the unequal power relations of the colonial situation. The very term bidonville—first appearing in Casablanca in the early 1930s—was the word used by the French. In Casablanca, the local Arab-Berbers often used the term kariƗn, the latter an Arabicized form of carrières (quarries) referring to Carrières centrales, the most politically radical of the shanty-towns (House 2012). The local term thus showed the mixture of French and Arabic characteristic of the wider city (Adam 1972 (I): 86-7). Similarly, in Algiers, the locals Arabicized the plural of the French term baraque (shack) from baraques to barƗrak, a word which, with some irony, sounded close to baraka, referring to Allah’s blessing. This gave rise to a play on words recorded by sociologist Jean-Claude Reverdy when speaking in 1961 with a dejected young male resident of the small SidiHadjères shanty-town in the European-dominated Télemly district overlooking central Algiers: “Blessing? Blessing? The only blessing I have is to live in a blessed shack! If I was blessed, I’d be in a house made of concrete” (Reverdy 1963: 32).8 This quotation illustrates cultural mixing at play and the knowing manipulation of different codes in which some shanty-town dwellers engaged as urbanites, or as neo-urbanites (néocitadins), the latter another term used by contemporary writers.

Social, Cultural and Political Change in the City Observing, as this chapter has done so far, that contemporary analysts had difficulty in “naming” the various processes of change underway is simply the start, rather than the conclusion, of any study of the latecolonial city. In fact, internal migration had already had a considerable impact on these cities, where diverse indigenous and European cultures co-existed in a context of strong spatial and socio-economic segregation at the micro-level. The post-1945 arrivals therefore simply made more diverse this existing heterogeneity. For example, in Algiers, beyond the better-known hybrid forms of European (pied-noir) culture, in-migration since the 1920s was said to have “Kabylized” the Casbah and, in turn, “Arabicized” many of those Kabyles having moved to Algiers from nearby Kabylia. Omar Carlier has rightly identified the role played by the Algiers Casbah as a site incorporating new migrants and a place of cultural mixing (Carlier 2009): the Casbah’s historic function certainly remained, as with

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its counterpart in Casablanca, the Old Medina. However, from the late 1930s onwards, the importance of such areas was increasingly matched by the emergence of new poor districts (quartiers populaires), often ethnically mixed neighbourhoods such as Belcourt or Clos-Salembier in Algiers, and, during the 1950s, at micro-level, new social housing estates, with which many shanty-town dwellers also interacted. In Casablanca, the New Medina’s close proximity to the central European district created new economic, social and cultural exchanges, as did the Carrières centrales shanty-town’s location next to the city’s main industrial district, which aided trade union influence. To understand the shanty-towns, in addition to the regional links that their inhabitants maintained, and nationalist activities and other forms of sociability within the shanty-town, we therefore need to look further at the wider urban landscape in which their inhabitants were situated. For in addition to the absence of Europeans, the distinguishing feature of the shanty-towns in relation to other poor areas was that the inhabitants often had to go elsewhere to engage in newer urban cultural and social activities (e.g., sports, associations): some of these, as we shall see, also fulfilled an important political function. However, especially in Algiers, these dynamics largely internal to the respective local societies were of less interest to the European gazes that centred, instead, upon “contact” between local and European societies. The new forms of social, cultural and indeed political practices analysed here cannot be reduced to narratives of attempted cultural reproduction / re-invention, nor to westernization, nor to anti-colonial resistance, yet might combine elements of all three—and others—in novel ways. The rest of the essay examines elements of such hybrid practices increasingly present across both cities, starting with socio-cultural aspects to move to more openly political dimensions: the “integration” or incorporation of newcomers to both cities took place via urban cultural and political forms which blended diverse European and similarly plural local elements through “selective accommodation” (Goodman and Silverstein 2009: 19). For example, beyond the social and cultural elites, the reference point for many Algerian women arriving in Algiers was not European models of dress and appearance but those of the Casbah and other poor areas. Marie Chéné’s study on the shanty-town of Boub’sila / Bérardi in suburban Algiers shows that in the early 1950s, women arriving from the countryside into the shanty-town there decided against having their daughters tattooed, since this practice was not commonplace in Algiers (Chéné 1963: 81).

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Descloîtres, Reverdy and Descloîtres, speaking of the Nador-Scala shanty-town in Algiers in 1956, admitted that they could not identify any over-arching trend: some women dressed identically to women in their home villages, others imitated women in the Casbah (Descloîtres, Reverdy, Descloîtres 1961: 19).9 Elsewhere, one finds intriguing references to Algerian teddy-boys (blousons noirs) in Algiers: at the very moment at which young people represented the most dynamic elements of the mass pro-independence street protests of 1960-61, some young Algerian men appropriated Metropolitan French styles heavily informed by popular music: yet such styles (strongly influenced by American music) were themselves being adopted by European working class males, many of whom were, on the contrary, radically pro-French Algeria.10 In Casablanca, Egyptian cinema—itself a hybrid form—also influenced clothing (Rivet 2002: 310). Indeed, for some official observers in Casablanca, Egyptian films represented a welcome indirect form of westernization. As DAU officer Jean Mothes colourfully put it: “Egyptian cinema predigests European culture making the latter easier for the Moroccan public to take on board. Thus with cinema, as in other areas, the road to the West passes through Cairo” (Mothes 1951: 56).11 Carlier describes cinema-going as an “imported” cultural practice that was “adopted and adapted” by local societies (2009: 220): this meant a mixture of French, American and Egyptian films, something underway since the 1920s. Detailed studies indicate the popularity of cinema amongst men from the Algiers shanty-towns.12 Given that there were no cinemas in the shanty-towns in either city, cinema-going by definition brought people from there to other districts. Finally, it should be noted that Egyptian cinema also promoted imported musical styles (Mothes 1951:15; Adam 1972 (II): 519). Various popular cultural influences were therefore at work in the central and also better-established poor areas of Casablanca and Algiers, with which some shanty-town dwellers mixed: the urban landscape beyond the shanty-town provided a context in which, alongside the novel cross-fertilization of various Algerian and Moroccan regional cultures, the Maghreb-Europe dynamic existed in a complex relationship with the Middle East and beyond. Indeed, in other areas (sport, scouts, trade unions), nationalist organizations in both cities (MTLD then FLN, IstiqlƗl) purposefully employed “borrowed” European cultural forms as channels of political influence that were then “appropriated” and “reinvented” locally (Carlier 2009: 224; House 2012). Strategic pragmatism necessitated such developments, as for the previously examined urban-rural links.

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Simultaneously, these “newer” forms—many of which in fact dated back to the 1930s, if not well beyond (Carlier and Marouf 1995)—were combined with existing forms of sociability, themselves undergoing considerable change: the free Muslim schools, trade corporations and, in Casablanca, the Sultan. Mosques, cafés, eating houses, shops, hairdressers and hamams also constituted important places of sociability near, when not within, the shanty-towns, and where the nationalist message also circulated. This lead to what Cerych called, for Casablanca, a “creative fusion” of “old” and “new” social and political forms (Cerych 1964: 391), and what Carlier and Marouf term the “diversification” of forms and places of sociability in Algiers (Carlier and Marouf 1995: 202). Migration no doubt constituted both a challenge and an opportunity to nationalist organizations as well as to the colonial authorities: anti-colonial resistance sought to incorporate these newcomers into open or clandestine activities that, until the late 1940s, had previously centred upon districts where the better-established Moroccan or Algeria activists might live. A key vector of nationalist socialization, trade unionism constitutes perhaps the best known of such developments and illustrates the process by which many shanty-town dwellers’ political socialization was undertaken “off-site.” Trade unions were, initially at least, a European political form before mass Arab-Berber membership: while also important in Algiers (Bourouiba 1998), their significance in Casablanca, which had a better-established industrial sector, cannot be underestimated. In the first years of the 1950s, the IstiqlƗl nationalists had gained influence within the General Union of Moroccan Confederated Trade Unions, enabling political strikes. Trade unionism brought together overlapping generations of internal migrants from different regions alongside longer-established city dwellers. In Casablanca, factories and employer-built worker housing near to the shanty-towns were important in the political socialization of the shanty-town residents, to the extent to which Carrières centrales became a key centre of nationalist militancy. Writing in 1950, Casablanca DAU officer Roger Maneville observed the shifting interests of the “Moroccan proletariat” as he called it, and its ever-widening political imaginaries, citing these people’s interest in political developments in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Middle East, while “at local level, strikes, social conflict, the nationalist parties’ activities and the Sultan’s attitude particularly fascinate them” (Maneville 1950: 201).13 The Casablanca nationalist and trade union strikes, demonstrations and resulting repression of December 7-8, 1952 constitute the most obvious example of such transformations, with new forms of protest, using different physical spaces than previously: demonstrations occurred across

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the city and centred not just on Carrières centrales, but also on the trade union headquarters, located in the heart of Casablanca’s central commercial centre (House 2012). These events also illustrated the links between different Moroccan districts. In both cities, the Muslim scout movement—both for boys and girls— represented a further key vector of nationalist socialization (Carlier 2003; House 2012: 85). As with the trades unions, the scouts, informed by Muslim affiliations, would typically be based outside of the shanty-town but attract inhabitants from it. Sport—in particular football—constituted another important example of imported practices, creating new forms of masculine sociability, and combined new urban territorial affiliations (district / city) with older-established identities, again operating “off-site” (Fates 2003: 160). The role of sporting associations—along with the scouts—was often to provide a physical presence during public events. After 1945, both Casablanca and Algiers saw the emergence of a multi-centred, multi-sited nationalist “archipelago,” as new districts emerged beyond the Casbah in Algiers (Carlier 2009: 223-6), and the medina in Casablanca. This ultimately produced a partial displacement within the previous “hierarchy” of the nationalist urban geography, exemplified, as we have seen, by the December 1952 events in Casablanca. In Algiers, this shift was illustrated by the pro-independence demonstrations of 10-12 December 1960 taking place in the poor suburbs (Hussein-Dey and Maison-Carrée / El-HarrƗch) as well as across the central city, coming after several years during which the FLN’s ability to mobilize the urban poor had been compromized due to the repression of the “Battle of Algiers” (Meynier 2002: 465-7). Indeed, in Algiers, as in Casablanca, there was no linear, teleological narrative: repression undermined most nationalist political activities, forcing them underground after December 1952 in Casablanca, and, in Algiers, after November 1954, and then again 1956-7. Yet repression helped to draw together both new-comers and longer-established residents, arguably partially compensating weakened nationalist infrastructures, and eliding at least some of the hostility that shanty-town dwellers might face in the eyes of other local residents, both as “migrants” and as occupants of marginalized urban spaces.

Conclusion This chapter has tried to read, from a spatial perspective, the articulation between different forms of social-cultural and political identifications during a period of rapid change and accelerated migration. In both Casablanca and Algiers, the dominant forms of nationalism that

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emerged from the mid-1940s onwards strategically used both newer and longer-standing cultural, social and political identities in previously unseen and ever resourceful ways: nationalism could be pragmatic and expedient where needed. Often, nationalism was an example of strategic appropriation from an ever-widening range of socio-cultural and political identities from within and across the Franco-North African space and well beyond. Certainly, the nationalists never had full control over such processes, as seen by the MTLD / FLN’s and IstiqlƗl’s uneven implantation across urban space and its inhabitants. Similarly, negotiating social change involved, for both FLN and IstiqlƗl, having to assess the complex impact of such transformations on, inter alia, gender relations (MacMaster 2009: Zisenwine 2010: 100-2). Furthermore, refugee migration into Algiers produced tensions between newcomers and longer-standing residents, especially at the height of refugee migrations (1958-1962) (Darbel, Rivet, Seibel, Bourdieu 1963: 475-95). However, it could be argued that in the urban context, the success of these different nationalist movements stemmed from their ability to understand the processes of flux in which many of the urban poor found themselves, and to tailor their message(s) accordingly (Adam 1972 (II): 653; Cerych 1964: 284-5; Descloîtres and Debzi 1965: 53). Shanty-towns, in this respect, are perhaps not just metaphors of colonial uprooting and spatial manifestations of socio-ethnic inequalities: they are also emblematic of the challenges faced by urban nationalism. In this sense, nationalism arguably proved capable of “speaking” to the preoccupations of a number of different social constituencies: its message transcended—without necessarily totally eliding—longer-established social identities. In terms of the shanty-towns, we should therefore not necessarily be thinking about new social urban identities coming to replace those from the countryside, but, rather, to combine and blend with them in ways and proportions that varied according to each shanty-town and its distinctive and yet shifting population profile, making any generalization difficult (Carlier and Marouf 1995). Unsurprisingly, the colonial state, its officials, and many contemporary European analysts struggled to keep pace with these changes (Lucas and Vatin 1975: 64). The genealogy of critical vocabulary within postcolonial studies tells us that terms such as creolization, hybridization and transculturation were born in colonial contexts other than the late-colonial Maghreb (Prabhu 2007; Stewart 2007). Whatever the term chosen to describe the forms of social, cultural and political change studied here, heuristically it needs to encourage us to think of processes that produce further change, a perpetual

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fluidity, and not in terms of an easily definable result of those processes: cultural hybridity works at both synchronic and diachronic levels. However, the historian of late-colonial Morocco and Algeria, knows that this period is simultaneously one of both cross-fertilization and yet ethnic, cultural and political polarization (Fates 2001). We need to examine the political functions that such cross-fertilizations are asked to perform, since drawing on a range of influences to fashion cultures of resistance. For like all nationalisms, the pro-independence struggle involved a redefinition and “reinvention” of nationhood, that is, an assertion of who does and does not belong to a collective “us.” This at times restrictive (re-)drawing of the symbolic frontiers of the political community often existed in a state of productive tension with precisely some of the highly diverse forms of political and cultural influences that had informed nationalism: nationalizing models can be hybrid in inspiration, but essentializing and reductive in practice, and all the more restrictive when developing in the context of extreme repression. This was particularly the case for the FLN, for example. Much remains to be known of the complexity of such processes: for some, “polyphony” therefore constitutes the most apposite means of describing cultural and political identities not so much combined, as co-existing in the late-colonial city (Fabre 2002). The relationship between the binary of the colonial divide, and yet the infinite complexity of the social, cultural and political relations it encouraged, maintained and reshaped, is perhaps another “tension of empire” (Cooper and Stoler 1997). This tension can clearly be seen within the shanty-towns, but only understood by examining how, why, and to what extent these spaces—and their inhabitants—both engaged with, and were engaged by, the wider city around them, and well beyond.

Notes 1

See Descloîtres and Debzi (1965): Descloîtres, Descloîtres and Reverdy (1962); Reverdy (1963). 2 On these debates, see Martín-Criado (2008): Goodman and Silverstein (2009). The destitution of many war-time migrants probably reinforced the prevalence of such judgments for Algiers, as opposed to Casablanca. 3 Bourdieu and Sayad (1964: 162): Montagne (1950: 18-19, 50); Maneville (1950: 38-9); Çelik (1997: 110). 4 See Bourdieu (2008): Adam (1972). 5 “Cette difficulté à les définir révèle peut-être leur profonde originalité et l’impossibilité de les rattacher aux normes de référence habituelles… les bidonvilles ne sont pas simple répétition d’un déjà vu, mais création inédite.” 6 “il s’agit de quelque chose de plus qu’un mélange ou d’une juxtaposition. Il s’agit de la fusion en un nouveau tout, sui generis.”

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7

Torrès (1954): Reverdy (1963); Chéné (1963); Adam (1949); Maneville (1950). “La baraka, la baraka? En fait de baraka, j’habite une baraque, oui ! Si je l’avais, la baraka, j’habiterais une maison en dur.” 9 For Casablanca, see Adam (1972 (II): 751); Cerych (1964: 368). 10 Archives Nationales d’Outre-mer (Aix-en-Provence, hereafter ANOM), 2 SAS 59, SAU Clos Salembier, report of April 26, 1960. 11 “La culture européenne est en somme prédigérée par le cinéma égyptien et rendue plus assimilable au public marocain. Ainsi dans ce domaine, comme dans quelques autres, la route de l’Occident passe par le Caire.” See also Adam (1972 (II): 518-21). 12 ANOM, 2 SAS 60, SAU Clos Salembier, Budgets familiaux dans le quartier du Clos Salembier (1960-1961). See also Torres (1954: 34). 13 “localement : grèves, conflits sociaux, action des partis nationalistes, attitude du souverain les passionnent de façon toute particulière.” 8

References Adam, André. “Le Bidonville de Ben M’sik à Casablanca.” Annales de l’Institut d’études orientales de la faculté de lettres d’Alger. Vol.8, 1949: 61-199. —. Casablanca. Essai sur la transformation de la société marocaine au contact de l’Occident. Paris: CNRS (2 vols.), 1972 (first published 1968). Balandier, Georges. “La Situation coloniale: ancien concept, nouvelle réalité.” French Politics, Culture and Society. Vol.20, No.2, 2002: 410. Berque, Jacques. “Médinas, villeneuves et bidonvilles.” Les Cahiers de Tunisie. Nos. 21-22, 1958: 239-72. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Les Sous-prolétaires algériens”, in Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisses algériennes, Paris: Seuil, 2008: 193-212 (first published 1962). Bourdieu, Pierre and Sayad, Abdelmalek. Le Déracinement. La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie. Paris: Minuit, 1964. Bourouiba, Boualem. Les Syndicalistes algériens. Leur combat. De l’éveil à la libération. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. Carlier, Omar. Entre nation et jihad. Histoire sociale des radicalismes algériens. Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1995. —. “Mouvements de jeunesse, passage des générations et créativité sociale : la radicalité inventive algérienne des années 1940-1950”, in Nicolas Bancel, Daniel Denis and Youssef Fates (eds.), De l’Indochine à l’Algérie. La jeunesse en mouvements des deux côtés du miroir colonial 1940-1962. Paris: La Découverte, 2003: 163-76.

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—. “Médina et modernité : l’émergence d’une société civile « musulmane » à Alger à l’entre-deux-guerres”, in Pierre Robert Baduel (ed.), Chantiers et défis de la recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain. Paris: Karthala, 2009: 199-227. Carlier, Omar and Marouf, Nadir. Espaces maghrébins. La force du local? Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995. Çelik, Zeynep. Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations. Algiers under French Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Cerych, Ladislav. Européens et Marocains 1930-1956. Sociologie d’une décolonisation. Bruges: De Tempel, 1964. Chéné, Marie. “Treize ans d’histoire d’un bidonville algérien. « Bubs’ila » 1950-1963”, unpublished study, 1963. Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura (eds.). Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Darbel, Alain, Rivet, Jean-Paul, Seibel, Claude and Bourdieu, Pierre. Travail et travailleurs en Algérie. Paris: Mouton, 1963. Descloîtres, Robert and Debzi, Laïd. Système de parenté et structures familiales en Algérie. Aix-en-Provence: Centre africain des sciences humaines appliquées, 1965. Descloîtres, Robert, Descloîtres, Claudine and Reverdy, Jean-Claude. “Organisation urbaine et structures sociales en Algérie”, Civilisations, Vol.XII, 1962: 211-36. Descloîtres, Robert, Reverdy, Jean-Claude and Descloîtres, Claudine. L’Algérie des bidonvilles. Le tiers-monde dans la cité. Paris: Mouton, 1961. Fabre, Thierry. “Metaphors for the Mediterranean: Creolization or Polyphony?” Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol.17, No.1, 2002: 15-24. Fates, Youssef. “Sport et politique en Algérie. De la période coloniale à nos jours.” PhD. thesis, Paris-I University, 2001. —. “Le club sportif, structure d’encadrement et de formation nationaliste de la jeunesse musulmane pendant la période coloniale”, in Nicolas Bancel, Daniel Denis and Youssef Fates (eds.), De l’Indochine à l’Algérie. La jeunesse en mouvements des deux côtés du miroir colonial 1940-1962. Paris: La Découverte, 2003:150-62. Goodman, Jane E. and Silverstein, Paul A. “Introduction. Bourdieu in Algeria”, in Jane E. Goodman and Paul A. Silverstein (eds.), Bourdieu in Algeria. Colonial Politics. Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2009: 1-62.

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House, Jim. “L’impossible contrôle d’une ville coloniale ? Casablanca, décembre 1952.” Genèses. Sciences sociales et histoire, No.86, March 2012: 79-104. Lucas, Philippe and Vatin, Jean-Claude. L’Algérie des Anthropologues, Paris: Maspero, 1975. MacMaster, Neil. Burning the Veil. The Algerian War and the ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women, 1954-1962. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Maneville, Roger. Prolétariat et bidonvilles. Paris: Centre des Hautes études sur l’Afrique et l’Asie modernes, 1950. Martín-Criado, Enrique. Les deux Algérie de Pierre Bourdieu. Bellecombe-en-Bauges: Editions du Croquant, 2008. Meynier, Gilbert. Histoire intérieure du FLN 1954-1962, Paris: Fayard, 2002. Montagne, Robert. Naissance du prolétariat marocain. Enquête collective exécutée de 1948 à 1950. Paris: Peyronnet, 1950. Mothes, Jean. Le Film égyptien devant le public marocain, Paris: Centre des Hautes études sur l’Afrique et l’Asie modernes, 1951. Prabhu, Marwan M. Hybridity or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. Prochaska, David. Making Algeria French. Colonialism in Bône, 18701920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Reverdy, Jean-Claude. Recherches sur les attitudes du sous-prolétariat algérien à l’égard de la société urbaine. Aix-en-Provence: Centre africain des sciences humaines appliquées, 1963. Rivet, Daniel. Le Maghreb à l’épreuve de la colonisation. Paris: Hachette, 2002. Stewart, Charles (ed.). Creolization. History, Ethnography, Theory. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2007. Tipps, Dean C.. “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective”, Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol.15, No.2, March 1973: 199-226. Torres, M.G. “Un bidonville d’Alger. La Cité Mahieddine.” Bulletin de la section de géographie du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (Actes du 18è Congres national des sociétés savantes, Toulouse, 1953). Vol. LXVI, 1954: 15-36. Zisenwine, David. The Emergence of Nationalist Politics in Morocco. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010.

CHAPTER TWELVE FRONTIÈRES DE FRANCOPHONIE: FRANCOPHONE AFRICA AND RETHINKING POLITICAL AND DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES JOHN NIMIS UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

This essay is a set of reflections and questions, centered on the question of borders, as a division of either physical or intellectual space. From the English-speaking context, the cognate “frontier” for the French word for border, “frontière,” already evokes a border as something to push beyond. The concept of “border-crossing” has become a common topic in many contexts: in academia, it is interdisciplinary or transnationality; in the arts, “cross-over” or hybrid genres; in economics, multinationalism or globalization; and in politics, border-crossing manifests in migration and immigration (both legal and illegal) or transnational political cooperation (such as military coalitions, or the United Nations). Borders are part of a system of articulations, and in this way, they are structured much like a language: it is the act of differentiation that allows humans to create meaning, and to think and speak together. Like languages, borders are always contingent and, to some extent, arbitrary human inventions that become historical facts. For this reason, we should be always attentive and even vigilant to the historical nature of borders, and to the articulations that they enable or stifle. In this essay, I will look at several different spaces designated by the term “francophonie.” I will focus on the language that is used to divide physical and intellectual spaces and how these different “francophonies” are inhabited by people and cultural objects. In a turbulent time for the humanities, and for foreign language departments in particular, I believe it is important that we use terms like this one clearly, and think critically about what we are trying to defend in the name of “French” and/or “francophone.” I will use the specific example of my main research project

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on music from francophone Africa to suggest ways of thinking forward with the literary humanities: neither abandoning the borders handed down from the past, nor retreating behind these borders, hiding from a broader world, whose rapidly changing and dissolving divisions threaten these traditions.

Francophone Geographies: Universalism and Exclusion The Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie describes its mission, in part, as “the bringing together of peoples by mutual understanding” and “the reinforcement of their solidarity.”1 While this language represents the official discourse of one organization, it reflects an attitude that is more generalized. At the very least, in that it is written as a polemic to convince a French-speaking public of the validity of the OIF’s mission, it is designed to speak to the values of this public. In this section, I will look briefly at the way the idea of francophonie is articulated in this context. Rather than trying to create an objective picture of la francophonie, I will compare the way the OIF “imagines” this community to the way francophonie is articulated in other contexts. In a document produced in 2006-2007, la francophonie is described as multiple “spaces” (“espaces”), which are designated using several different adjectives: culturel, médiatique, économique, politique. This language suggests a multi-dimensional topography, with each of these spaces having its own set of boundaries, overlaid and partially overlapping. The most clear of these designations, and the most commonly referred to with the term “l’espace francophone,” is a geographical one. The organization defines this physical “francophone space” as the collective national territories which belong to the OIF, and/or where there are populations of French speakers, and it thus depends radically on the political structure of the nation-state. When looking at the “monde de la francophonie” map,2 a world map highlighting the member countries, one sees a discontinuous and fragmented space: irregular orange and green shapes scattered about (one color for “member” nations and another for “observer” nations), separated by large swaths of blue oceans and gray “non-francophone” land. The text on the map registers the fact that the physical territory of this “francophonie” is inclusive of many non-French speakers: the “total inhabitants” figure on the bottom of the official OIF map is the combined populations of all of the member nation-states—890 million “inhabitants”—as opposed to the figure for French-speakers, 220 million “francophones.”

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“La francophonie” as a cultural space (“espace culturel”) is quite a different animal. Despite being geographically scattered (in fact, in intentional and meaningful contrast to it), the cultural space of “la francophonie” is imagined as continuous and even homogeneous: a global cultural continuity, binding together a multicultural and diverse world through the French language: the “solidarity” referred to in the first paragraph of this section. This cultural space can transcend the confines of the geographical “espace francophone”: for example, writers such as Assia Djebar, Edouard Glissant, and Alain Mabanckou are unambiguously part of this cultural space, even when based in the U.S. In fact, at certain points, the language of the OIF suggests the importance of crossing political boundaries, such as when it refers to “the values that [la francophonie] intends to carry in the heart of and beyond its geographical space.”3 This quotation explicitly contrasts the cultural space to the physical one, and suggests a cultural space that is also a moral space, tied to the use of French: the OIF website defines the community as “having in common the use of the French language and respect for universal values.”4 This “francophonie” is imagined as a French-speaking “world,” with a solidarity primarily existing through the French language and “universal values.” From Rousseau to Sarkozy, the French version of "universal" culture meant that a person's biological or geographical origins do not matter, as long as they adhere to certain ideas and cultural standards (among which is the use of French). This inclusiveness is foundational to claims of solidarity and unity through French, but in a 2001 essay, Naomi Schor sketches the history of the concept of universalim in the French context, and looks at some of the ways in which this universalism is exclusive, using the example of the exclusion of women from the French universalist cultural “world.”5 Schor also refers to the recent controversy with regard to Muslim headscarves, and the issue of “laïcisme” in France, a rule of exclusion invoked in the name of universalism. The wearing of religious symbols is seen as citizens transgressing a unified, homogeneous mode of secular living, which the government sees itself as legitimate in enforcing on the basis of universality. I point this out to demonstrate that even the “universal” has borders and contours, and that this French universalism is only one possible universal perspective. By from “outside” this perspective, it is clear that even universalist ideologies are “located.” Exclusion from the cultural geography is also a byproduct of the universalist conglomeration of nations that the OIF calls “la francophonie.” If a single language and set of values is the basis of its “solidarity,” cultural products generally only count as “culture,” from the

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perspective of the “francophone north” if they “speak to” French speakers. Because it is imagined as a “world” through the French language and specifically French “universal values,” many arts that are produced in the geographical francophone aren’t actually considered as “inside” la francophonie. Not all residents of the physical space of “la francophonie” speak French, and similarly, many arts that are produced in the geographical francophone space don’t actually belong to francophone cultural space, especially those in local or regional languages and for local audiences. What I want to point out here is that the OIF stakes a geographical claim to “la francophonie” and represents a cultural space under the same name, the latter which has different boundaries than the geographical space, producing a world-view in which some people and cultures have no space, or speak into a cultural “non-space.” There are many ways to “read” the impulses behind the desire to “reinforce” solidarity. My own speculation is that imagining one’s own culture as universal eases the moral weight of a history (and present) of oppression, subjugation, and discrimination. A higher number of “francophones” or inhabitants of “la francophonie” legitimates that universality, even if only on its own terms. Two things are certain: first, this articulation of “francophonie” constitutes an attempt to see the world in terms of a new system of divisions, to “imagine” post- or at least supernational communities; and second, this new vision bears the traces of old organizational systems, in this case the nation-state, which is the basis of the OIF’s geographical claim. These are the points of comparison that I will draw on in the next section.

Intellectual Geographies: French, Literature, and the Humanities It is the nature of divisions that they do not include everything and everyone, and the question of whether or not the OIF counts them as inside the physical or cultural francophonie has very little effect on most people. However, I want to look at another “mapping” of cultural space that deploys this same term: in the context of academia. The geography of academia, like that of political or cultural space, is characterized by conflicting, overlapping organizational paradigms, and its borders are also a product of a specific history. When speaking about divisions within the university community in the U.S., we speak of administrative units, such as departments, schools, and programs. However, the language of dividing the disciplines and their objects of study is almost always evocative of topography, with terms like “field,” “domain,” or “area.” Because of the

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Eurocentric history of Western academia, these boundaries mirror the political and linguistic divisions of Western Europe, such as departments of French, German, Spanish, and similar divisions within departments of History, Political Science, etc. In this context, French departments, like the OIF, were organized around a single language that operated as a rule of exclusion, neatly dividing the Eurocentric world into national languages. Today, these divisions are being challenged, from many different directions. One “solidarity” in Western academia is between the study of foreign languages and literature. This combination has a basis in a local history: the intimate bond between written literature, language, and the structures of identity and community in post-Renaissance Western culture comes from the simultaneity of technological advances in writing and print with modern political structures (the nation-state) and market-based economic structures. Written literature is central to national communities in the West because, historically, people have interpreted written texts, and defined themselves and their world through these texts. For French culture in particular, literature occupies a large part of the national cultural space, and while language departments deal with heterogeneous cultural objects and constantly evolving languages, literature and literary studies have been a site where the imagining of continuities has taken place: continuities of language as well as of national cultures. The emergence of “la francophonie” as a subfield of French studies is relatively recent, and has drawn its energy from a variety of different questions over its history. Literature in the late colonial era was key to the challenging of the French colonial empire, as human subjects from the colonies used literature to establish a voice in the French cultural world. Writers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Léopold Senghor, Mongo Beti, and others, spoke to the French metropole in a language that was legible as human, and challenged the legitimacy of colonialism, to a great extent by deploying the language of French universalism. This was the francophonie of anti-colonialism, of establishing a “présence” for nonEuropean French speakers in the world-view of the French, and academia was on the front lines of this fight. The francophone literature of the post-independence era was, to a great extent, a continuation of this initial movement, with the new goal of establishing cultural traditions in the former colonies, most of them in “national” terms, and, once again, in terms borrowed to a great extent from French universalism. However, when a particular medium (such as literature) or language (such as French) is seen as a privileged vehicle for universality and for humanity, categories like “francophone” literature

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become a means for measuring the distance between French culture and “others,” and the “universal” French language and culture is at the same time the means for abolishing that distance. I will discuss the repercussions of this “moment” further in the following section. More recently, interest in “la francophonie” has ballooned, along with a broader growth of interest in transnational and interdisciplinary research and in the postcolonial world in Western academia, across departments and national traditions. For young people (i.e. students) and for institutions that fund research, economic opportunity, at both the individual level and on larger scales (for corporations, governments, etc.), is increasingly dependent on a global mindset: mobility, flexibility, and other kinds of “border-crossings” that are already taking place in what is perceived as a new global economy. This has posed a challenge to the “traditional” Eurocentric division of the world: into the 20th century, an institution with departments of French, English, German, Spanish, and Russian might have been considered to cover the entire cultural “world.” This evolution, which had mostly to do with an expanding vision of the world, has been accelerated by the recent economic crisis and the subsequent budget cuts. Budget considerations, especially at public research institutions, have academic administrators looking for new models for organizing departments and programs, with a mind to efficiency. This has exacerbated the stress on traditional academic geographies, and has been felt acutely in most language and literature departments, where it has led to pressing existential questions. In the humanities in particular, many researchers and professors feel asked to justify the existence not only of their research projects and courses, but of their departments. Another recent trend is a preference for science- and math-based degrees, or skill-based degrees, that has had the effect of what one colleague called a “quantitative creep” in the humanities:6 the increased evaluation of research and teaching in terms of numerically and statistically “provable” criteria (class size, grant money awarded, etc). In a global, quantitatively-minded world, what is the place of humanistic modes of inquiry, especially when the structure of the literary humanities is so tied to the construction of national cultural traditions? Unfortunately, within the borders of French departments and the field of French, outside pressure has embroiled francophone studies, like all of literary studies’ subfields, in a struggle for space. But as we have seen above, the forces driving this conflict are largely shaped outside of these departments, and even outside the university: economic crisis, a globalizing world that attracts a new work force to new categories of economic opportunities, and an evolving political landscape in which

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forms of “culture” are alternatively idealized and demonized, in the name of swaying a fickle and changing electorate. Few would argue that we should revert back to the times when the idea of what comprises “the whole world” of modern culture in Western academia excluded the majority of humans, but in a time of shrinking budgets and departments and challenges to the humanities as a paradigm, individual scholars, departments, disciplines, feel that they are under attack and threatened with extinction. In the face of these fears, the legitimation of departments has tended to happen in the quantitative terms handed down from administrations: the academic job market, course enrollments, and the like. How, then, do we go forward without compromising and undermining the very kinds of thinking that make the humanities what they are, and also find the “space” for a larger world? I believe strongly that these are questions that we in the humanities should be asking, and that we should be able to answer, even in terms that are not “local” to our fields. After all, speaking to and understanding others, even those who don’t use the same language or have the same set of assumptions we do, is purportedly the kind of expertise that foreign language departments are passing on to students. I see this as the broader “geographical” context of recent debates on “Littérature-monde,” and the accompanying calling into question of the term “francophonie,” a large part of the impetus for this volume. Writers, drawing on the English-speaking model of “world literature,” propose a less Eurocentric term, but the resulting conversation has had mostly to do with redrawing boundaries inside the French departments, and debating the place and role of this academic “francophonie.” In my research, I do my best to sidestep this kind of question by situating my research in the larger space of academia and the cultural world, understanding my own fields and subfields (literary studies: French: francophonie) not as a homogeneous unities, but as one part of a constantly evolving division of the human project, with contested borders that are defined by humans, and thus arbitrary, and historically situated. I will show in the next section the specific way I have thought through finding new space within the preexisting designations of national departments of languages and literatures in my own research on Congolese music.

African Geographies: Fragments of Worlds, World of Fragments If “la francophonie” is the imagined continuity of a scattered physical geography, the African continent, conversely, is a continuous geographical

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space that is divided into separate political and cultural spaces. Africa’s unity and division is in a way opposite from that of “la francophonie”: a physical continuity in Africa has been historically divided by idealized boundaries, whereas the francophone space is an idealized unity that is being “reinforced” and encouraged by policy-makers, while its material reality (a physical, but also political reality) is one of separate, distant spaces. Notice that the “idealized” side of each of these equations is linked to European languages: the same national languages that divide the “world” of languages and written culture. The basis for modern nation-states in Africa was the colonial divisions, which were for the most part arbitrary. Conceived far away in Europe, they overlaid more complex social and political divisions. Today these have become a political and social reality, and although most African nations still grapple with the conflict between older political divisions (often along linguistic lines) and modern democratic power structures, many have a sense of belonging to a modern nation-state. If we remember the radical dependence on the nation-state in the geography of the OIF’s “francophonie,” we see that francophone Africa is doubly “deformed” in the world view of the OIF: on the one hand, “smoothed out” by a nationbased vision of the continent, with political divisions that are often in conflict with the precolonial linguistic and cultural geography7 and, at the same time, fragmented by the geography of “francophonie,” which suggests that anglophone neighbors are somehow part of a different postnational “world.” If writers of French expression from Africa are shifting away from the term “francophonie,” and are more concerned with being part of a “world” structure, it is in part because they feel connected to culture and the world in a way that is beyond the constraints of either French or “la francophonie.” My main research is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in this section, I will discuss the Congo as an example of the ambiguous relationships between the nation-state and both older and newer political structures in Africa. In my work on Congolese popular music, I argue that African writing in French and scholarship on it is limited by a concern with literature’s status as “inside” the space of the French-speaking literary tradition, to which it is marginal, and its marginality in the cultural space of Africa. The place of the francophone African writer is profoundly ambivalent, engaging both African culture and “universal” French culture, but writing from the margins, or even “outside,” both of these cultural spaces, producing what I call an epistemology of marginality. While there is nothing illegitimate or inauthentic about these writers or the questions they address, posing these questions from within the intellectual and cultural

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space of “la francophonie” not only maps Africa as marginal, and thus interesting only through the ways its “other”-ness is abolished by French, but also maps “culture” in Africa the same way as it does for the West. The most important example for my work is how the implicit assumption remains that literature should serve the same purposes in Africa, and functions in the same ways, as in Europe. Lydie Moudileno writes about the “disillusion” of postcolonial African writers who, after independence, expected written literature to be the core of new national cultures, but found that “the literary space is no longer the privileged space for negotiating identities.”8 Literature, especially in the French model, is universalized, and naturalized as a mode of national expression. Cultures are understood as either having reached the point of having a nationally (or universally) significant literary culture, or not having reached it yet, or in recent discourses, especially those bemoaning the decline of the humanities, as having degraded from this point. In my larger project, I observe that in the Congo, a modern tradition of recorded music, along especially with the technology of radio and the internet, has performed many of the same functions written literature did in the “nation-building” era in Europe: imagining a linguistically and culturally homogeneous national community and a space for polemic, debate, and conflict on the nature of this community, the nature of the world and human beings, and a place where a common language (even a multilingual common language: the music is most often in Lingala, but is mixed with other African languages as well as French) and aesthetics are established. For this reason, the questions that should be asked of this music are the same ones we ask of written literature in the West: what does it mean? To whom and in what context? How does it produce this meaning? What ideologies, personal, political, or philosophical, are served or undermined by the particular configurations of the texts? What is considered true, or beautiful, according to this tradition, and what does that tell us about the people, their language, and their community? What do these texts say without intending to? This is the approach that I call “literary listening,” which registers not only the similar functions of literature and recorded music, but also the differences, seeing music as a configuration of meaningful sounds, some verbal and some not, and not poems that just happen to be sung. Among the more persistent themes in recent music is a Congolese global or universal vision, which imagines a musical world radiating outward from Kinshasa. Musicians travel around “the entire world,” (“mokili mobimba,” a term that is often in the music), and their trajectory is often articulated as conquest. In concrete terms, this manifests itself in

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themes and song topics that invoke not only the “other” space of France, but also Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. These spaces are sources for musical and thematic material, appropriated by Congolese musicians and brought in as signifiers, but ultimately their purpose is to demonstrate the universality of Congolese music and its values. In other words, Congolese music is not only important to the existing national structure, but it is the site for imagining larger world structures, and constructs its own globalist and even universalist aesthetics. I observe that despite its centrality to Congolese culture, its vast popularity and influence across the physical space of the African continent (well beyond the borders of the Lingalaspeaking zones and francophone Africa), and its global vision, this music is only scantly represented in either the “world music” scene or in fields such as ethnomusicology. I read this in terms of the “rule of exclusion” that governs the situated universal vision of the genre of “world music”: being characterized by a foreignness that is audible, visible, and explicit,9 and while African music is studied in other contexts within academia, our understanding of it is limited by the paradigms of these disciplines and the position of “different” that is conveyed onto African culture.10 These shortcoming are in part analogous to the effect of the universalism of “la francophonie” within French literary studies, but I also argue that the kinds of questions that reveal the universalism of Congolese music’s aesthetics are “mapped” onto the field of literary studies in Western academia, and therefore much is to be gained from studying this music from the standpoint of languages and literature. I call my methodology “literary listening,” with the goal of registering the disciplinary space within Western academia (as it exists today by historical processes) where a particular set of questions is asked of texts. Just as there is nothing essentially “national” about literature, neither is there anything essentially “literary” about African music, but historically, Europe’s national communities evolved in conjunction with written culture, whereas the Congo’s modern structures of community were contemporaneous with different technologies. I strive to produce a critical language that is both appropriate to the specific culture I’m studying and strategically, self-consciously situated in the disciplinary and cultural present and recent past. The most important point here is what can be gained by historicizing the world’s different cultural geographies and the disciplinary geography of academia, rather than using “universal” terms for speaking about Congolese music: finding a space in the existing intellectual geography for new cultural forms that for so long had no place in the world-image produced in academia. .

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Conclusions: Imagining New Borders for Foreign Language Studies I have justified my choice of disciplinary “space” for my research on the music of the Congo in terms of the different cultural geographies between the West and Africa. Because popular music functions in Congolese society in similar ways to how literature has historically functioned in the West, I have “mapped” my research on Congolese music in the Eurocentrically-defined domain of literary studies. My work crosses disciplinary boundaries because its object of study doesn’t fit neatly into the current divisions of cultural space. I see this as an example of how the impulse towards interdisciplinary is driven by the expansion of the cultural “world” addressed by Western academia. Another way to talk about this choice is to say that there simply isn’t anywhere else in the divisions of scholarly methodologies for the interpretations and criticism of modern texts (I call the recorded music “aural texts”) in African languages, and I simply had to pick a place to create this new space. An analogous problem to mine with Lingala and Congolese music is being addressed in a number of different ways at universities that are scrambling to meet the rising demand for courses on Arabic language and culture, and different solutions have been found at different institutions. Arabic is a topic of rapidly growing interest, and the “geography” of the language does not fit neatly into the pre-existing structure of Western academia. Some institutions have found a space for Arabic outside the Eurocentric structures: at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, Arabic is housed in the department of African Languages and Literature (a department that is unique in its framing of African texts with African languages). Even this choice is limiting, in a sense, as Arabic’s influence and importance extends well beyond the geographical borders of Africa. But often at smaller schools, and especially at a time when resources are scarce, space must be made within the pre-existing Eurocentric structure: at Macalester College, Arabic is part of the classics department, alongside Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the languages of the sacred texts of the other Abrahamic religions. Grinnell College and Colorado College are among the small liberal arts colleges where Arabic is now housed with French. In these instances, the “francophone angle” may actually serve to “smuggle” both hexagonal French studies and francophone studies into the future of the College on the back of Arabic, which is on the rise, at least for the moment. These kinds of administrative decisions reflect the kind of creativity and broad thinking that has the potential to sustain foreign language

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programs through challenging times. We can imagine any number of ideal configurations: in my ideal, every university would have a department for every major world language (and many minor ones) that offered both language courses and advanced courses on the literary texts in these languages, across different media. But for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with economics and logistics, but also with (understandable) resistance to sweeping change in academia, these ideals are not immediately attainable. It is interesting to think about the Congo, and Africa in general, with respect to this question: most African states are working forward while retaining the political divisions created under colonialism. This is not an ideal, but a pragmatic choice, and while it has proven problematic on many levels, and rife with conflict (mostly due to a scramble for scarce resources), it is at least an attempt to move forward from present structures, however arbitrary their origins may be, rather than either reactionary politics, such as Mobutu’s “authenticity” movement in the Congo, or the attempt to produce an ideal structure ex nihilo. The OIF, to its credit, is imagining and reinforcing post-national solidarities, however clumsy and contradictory its ideology may be. But it is important to acknowledge, regardless of our field or discipline, that such new models are also being produced in other spaces, such as in the worldview constructed in Congolese popular music. As an intellectual in the humanities, I consider my task not as an enforcer or producer of these ideologies, but as a critic, to situate texts in order to understand the meaning(s) they convey and the mechanisms by which they produce these meanings; to reveal the assumptions that enable them, and the structures in which they “make sense”: both in the sense of being legible and of creating meaning; and to draw attention to the possibilities they stifle. Because of the nature of its historical ties to language and culture, literary studies as a disciplinary “space” has been central to these kinds of questions, and should continue to be. I am of the firm belief that there is much to be gained by holding on to literary canons, critical traditions, and old-fashioned literary questions. However, we must be willing to historicize our own perspectives, and see the ways they are limited and limiting. When “the world” was only Western Europe and “texts” were primarily written literature, the disciplinary structure of national language and literature departments was sufficient to this task. But modern cultural texts in all forms—written, film or tape, digital—exist in this multilingual, multicultural, transnational and profoundly ambivalent context. Even texts that seek to invent or imagine a “purity” or “homogeneity” of culture still must be understood in opposition to, and thus as products of and in relation to, the heterogeneity of lived realities. The relationships between

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these texts and their contexts are precisely what the tradition of literary studies, as I understand it, addresses. I am trying to suggest that as we move forward and make decisions, many of them difficult, about structuring departments, making new hires, advising graduate students and junior professors, we should think about French and la francophonie (and analogous categories in other departments) in terms of bigger questions and broader structures. On the one hand, hard economic times and a changing cultural landscape in the West are creating pressure to define (or redefine) the role of foreign language and literary studies, the role of the humanities in the university, and the place for academia in society. In this context, especially if questions about the identity of a field or literary canon are framed only within the space of a single discipline (such as “French”), the response is often defensive and even reactionary: something of value is being threatened with destruction, but we must preserve it. But we must remember that part of this pressure comes from a desire to make space for non-European cultures, and treat them as equal parts of a single cultural “world” (a process that Western academia is only beginning). I doubt that many intellectuals, if pressed on it, would truly advocate the retreat to a completely Eurocentric past, but this is exactly the way it can come across, when the questions are posed in too narrow a context. The broadening of questions and the contextualizing and historicizing of polemics is, in my mind, precisely the value of the humanities: we maintain the long view, in the face of an accelerating society. Fads and trends will influence our ways of thinking and speaking: the only alternative to this influence is to be cut off completely from the world around us. But nevertheless, we keep them in perspective by thinking about a much bigger picture, both geographically and historically. While we should maintain a critical distance from society and its values, to imagine ourselves as anything but a part of the human endeavor requires ignoring or denying our own historical and geographical specificity, our “situatedness.” The idea of the split between pure thought or knowledge and the practicalities of politics and economics is an idea whose scope is limited to the height of bourgeois colonial Western society, and while our institutions bear the traces of this time, we in the humanities should be the first to recognize this. We should make space for a larger world, in terms of both non-written media and non-Western voices (languages and cultures). By doing this, I believe that we are not at risk of losing or devaluing written literature. Instead, we are led to understand the tradition of literary studies as historically contingent, rather than “universal,” which frees us to find solidarities and continuities between literary processes in

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any number of languages and cultures, and between written texts and newer forms. Thinking about literature and the arts in this broader context can only strengthen our ability to describe “what we do” and why the humanities are legitimate, even invaluable, in terms that are comprehensible to those outside of our own fields, and outside the academic “world.”

Notes 1 La Francophonie Dans Le Monde. Paris: Larousse, 2007 (265): “le rapprochement des peuples par leur connaissance mutuelle” and “le renforcement de leur solidarité.” 2 I refer to the PDF maps available on the OIF website: December 2013. 3 Ibid. “les valeurs qu[e la Francophonie] entend porter au sein et au-delà de son espace géographique.” 4 December 2013: “ayant en partage l’usage de la langue française et le respect des valeurs universelles.” 5 Naomi Schor, “The Crisis of French Universalism”, Yale French Studies 100 (2001), 43-64. 6 Richard Goodkin coined this term in a panel entitled “Reprise: How? Research Methods in the Humanities” at the IRH (Institute for Research in the Humanities) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on May 7, 2012. 7 Tools such as the interactive map of language groups in Africa at (December 2013) can help to visualize the complexity of these overlapping political, cultural, and linguistic geographies. 8 Lydie Moudileno. Parades postcoloniales. Paris: Karthala, 2006: “l’espace littéraire n’est plus le seul espace privilégié de négociation identitaire.” 9 “...la world music opère avant tout selon une règle d’exclusion.” D.-C. Martin (2002) as quoted in Bob White, “Réflexions sur un hymne continental,” Cahier d’étudies africaines 168 (2002). 10 This argument is made most eloquently about the field of ethnomusicology in the monograph Representing African Music (2003) by Kofi Agawu.

References Agawu, Kofi. Representing African Music. New York: Routledge, 2003. White, Bob. “Réflexions sur un hymne continental”, Cahier d’étudies africaines 168 (2002). Moudileno, Lydie. Parades postcoloniales. Paris: Karthala, 2006. Naomi Schor, “The Crisis of French Universalism”, Yale French Studies 100 (2001), 43-64. La Francophonie Dans Le Monde. Paris: Larousse, 2007.

PART V : ÉCRITURE, FEMINITE, CREOLITE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN TRAVELING IN THE NEW FRANCOPHONIES: MARYSE CONDÉ’S THE STORY OF THE CANNIBAL WOMAN AND J.-M. G. LE CLÉZIO’S RÉVOLUTIONS ROBERT MILLER UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

« Je n’irai pas à Cadix avec vous. Je n’ai jamais aimé les voyages. » —Maryse Condé, Histoire de la femme cannibale

Even if their characters travel extensively, Maryse Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2003) and J.-M. G. Le Clézio’s Révolutions (2003) are not travel narratives in the classical sense; stories in which, to refer to Louis Marin for example, the trajectory and the crossing of geographical spaces constitutes the narrative itself (Marin 1973: 64-5). We argue however that these two narratives whose main characters travel represent a number of emerging cultural and social changes both in Francophone fiction and in the way that we understand travel. In his introduction to 20th Century Francophone travel narrative, Gérald Cogez presents a cogent synthesis of this conceptual and practical crisis: The persistent problem is that of the [travel narrative] genre itself in that the conditions and the very conception of travel have changed considerably in the last few decades: evolution in means of transportation, considerable development in the facility of journeys that saturate most of the planet, the progressive replacement of exploration per se by tourism. Added to which there is the most troubling consequence of these phenomena: the progressive disappearance of cultural differences in favour of a planetary uniformity that seems to make all travel superfluous. (Cogez 2004: 19)1

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Travel is beginning to lose its place of privilege, so much celebrated by Rousseau for example, as a potential source and the ultimate test of a successful experiential education.2 Besides the fact that the accessibility and reach of visual and auditory channels of communication have vastly increased, the questioning of centric discourses (Eurocentric or otherwise) and discourses of authentic identity discourages us from imagining any place at all that could offer us a firmer grip on reality than any other. Even if some people are still living, in their minds, in a world of “continents noirs,” such dark places are either kept in the closets of their imagination or on the nostalgic stage of an exoticism that still occasionally comes to the surface of public discourse. When one does complacently travel to seek out the phantasmagoric “other,” whether as an ecotourist or a volunteer Boy Scout, the number of people and peoples willing to be either studied or “helped” is on the decline (witness the healthy Ugandan and African backlash to a recent online campaign to help Ugandans fight a notorious rebel group). People are still on the hunt for poor people still ready to hold out their hands without conditions, preferably children, if possible orphans who will spontaneously smile with gratitude as they open their Christmas “boxes of love”; anyone who has neither choice nor voice. Despite this delirious search that still sometimes finds its way into public view, the missionary journey of our colonialist heritage seems more and more outdated and folkloric. Even involuntary nomadism, though still going strong in many places, is difficult to recognize in the commonplaces and conventional definitions of the life of refugees. As Paul Gilroy has pointed out in Postcolonial Melancholia, the multiculturalism of societies that imagine themselves to be lands of refuge and earthly paradises has become a highly tarnished image and has to some extent given way to paranoia. So what is travel? Does one take a train, an airplane or a boat to spend X number of days, months or years in a different country for accidental or insignificant reasons, but with no hope of changing either one’s own perception of the world or the world of those one “visits”? Is there anything comparable in early 21st Century travel narrative to a representation of “exploration per se” (if exploration per se was indeed every anything more than an adjunct of imperialism and/or ethnocentric curiosity)? Can we still recognize the traveler outside of all the outdated modalities of what Achille Mbembe called the incantatory discourse of endless repetition? Rosélie Thibaudin of The Story of the Cannibal Woman and Jean Marro of Révolutions have not invented anything new. In the final analysis their motives, decisions and movements represent fairly

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banal experiences, not particularly generous, though generally decent. Their efforts at being heroes of travel are lackluster, without audaciousness or conviction. Without being simply victims of the contradictions of the postcolonial world, they often allow things to happen to them instead of rebelling; or else they rebel when it is already too late to influence the outcome. Neither Condé’s nor Le Clézio’s travelers provide decisive answers to the question of why people would or should travel. Yet the two protagonists do introduce into their stories several elements that, without necessarily seeming very original, could help us to imagine differently the notion of travel as it could become in the foreseeable future, or perhaps as it has been for a long time without our notice. The traveler we see in Rosélie and Jean Marro realizes that he/she is incomplete and imperfect, not just in knowledge but also in what he/she has to offer to the people met along the way. Travel is not a means of correcting this imperfection, but rather of putting it on display, especially for oneself. For example, the suffering and privation of Aunt Catherine, the elderly relative who in Révolutions becomes the major source of Jean’s knowledge of his Mauritian background, explain why it is she who captures his attention and imagination rather than other relatives that he refers to as “indéracinables” (literally “unuprootable”), people who are not candidates for losing their roots. The “indéracinables” bear the mark of historical continuity, survival and persistence, but they cannot reveal to the traveler what he needs because they have never incarnated the sense of rupture that founds his existence. The narrator of Révolutions creates in Catherine a body that expresses its own absence from where it was supposed to be, that explains the false premises of its “place” in the world. Later, during his stay in Mexico, Jean decides to visit an immigrant neighbourhood in the city of Naucalpan. He notices as he arrives that no one notices him “except some street urchins who throw stones at him and run away laughing” (Le Clézio 2003: 465).3 When he asks some residents if they know the person he is looking for, they turn away without answering. Only once someone pays attention to him, when a mother, taking him for a doctor, asks him to help her baby who has been bitten by rats: “I move away walking backwards, like a thief. I don’t know any more what I came to do here. When someone is alone, coming from far away, maybe people start to believe in miracles, just because I took some courses at a London hospital.” (Le Clézio 2003: 467).4 Rosélie, the heroin of The Story of the Cannibal Woman, forced by her domineering husband Stephen to live for several years in New York before following him to Cape Town, is invited to take part in an African

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American art festival. One might expect this to be the ideal moment for her to affirm herself as an artist and a black woman, her artistic vocation having been smothered up to now by Stephen’s scorn. Tired of his constant disdain, she decides to accept the invitation and prepares a speech on her painting. She is left almost to the end of the session, when almost no one is left, and she gives a speech that her French accent makes incomprehensible for her dwindling audience (Condé 2007: 195). In both cases, the travelers do not land in a new world waiting to be discovered or to be saved, nor necessarily in a hostile environment, but rather in an atmosphere of indifference that at best takes them for what they are not. Rosélie is taken for the Black woman with a capital B that must be the same the world over; Jean is taken for the missionary redeemer who miraculously appears at a moment of crisis. If the travelers find themselves at once “de trop” and incomplete in themselves, caught between the role of the unknown stranger and the misunderstood outsider, is it not still possible for them to return to the country that was once their own? Is there no collective memory that could play, if only in a figurative sense, the role of a land of refuge? It may be to ironically play on such suggestions that Condé allows for Rosélie to end up in a post-apartheid South Africa where panafricanist discourse is looking more and more to her like an aging, conventional and predictable literature, with its incantatory names Fanon and Césaire, while psychological, physical and economic racial barriers continue to spread out before her foreigner’s eyes a persistent and contemptuous landscape of compartmentalization. It is collective memory that can allow an old Africaaner man to cling to his passionate hatred right to his deathbed, but Rosélie is not empowered by this partitioned universe to mark out a place for herself as a Guadeloupean woman who sounds French and is never African or European or anything else enough to be understood. Collective memory is an even more strongly represented theme in Révolutions, yet that memory does not lead to a sense of belonging any less equivocal than that of Rosélie. According to Abdelhaq Anoun, Révolutions “is a clear illustration of a certain literature of nostalgia in which the past is a space of values and dreams” (Anoun 2005: 27).5 While recognizing “the fragmented, shattered character” of the narrative that expresses this nostalgia, Anoun remains convinced that “its coherence is maintained by the specific perception of a narrator who takes the place of most of his characters by saying “je” in their place” (128).6 But can the nostalgic conscience of a “je,” as coherent as that conscience may be, guarantee the transmission of a collective memory, or does it rather reduce that memory to a collection of misplaced, unheard of memoirs, obsessive

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but heterogeneous and unreliable recollections, subject, as in the case of Aunt Catherine, to the ravages of sickness, dementia and silence? The traveler’s critical discourse is no longer based on the progressive discovery of a new country; rather it is woven out of images already frozen in time. That is what happens for example when Jean, now back in Nice, goes to visit Aunt Catherine who is interned in a nursing home named Josaphat after suffering a stroke. In the bubble of silence that surrounds Catherine, Jean pretends to ask her about old mysteries sealed in their family’s obliterated past (Le Clézio 2003: 372). He completes for her the story that she had begun but that he alone can continue, though even he has to add much of his own invention. This is a false and unsatisfactory solution but one nevertheless which enables Jean and Catherine to affirm the memory of the injustice on which their relationship as refugees is founded. Thus he tells her the story of the last day that she spent with her family on their property of Rozilis, in Mauritius: a bizarre scene that features the family dining while the bankers impatiently wait at the door to confiscate everything. They already hear the sound of the ebony trees being cut down. While the other members of the family are anxious to move on with their lives, to pursue life somewhere else, Catherine and her sister Maude have nothing else, “nowhere to go.” As Jean describes the moment for and to Catherine, “it was like dying, like the ebony trees and the black woods they were about to cut down” (Le Clézio 2003: 374).7 At a time when Catherine could speak freely for herself “she had taught Jean that time counts for nothing, that it is an invention of clockmakers, a poor pretext” (Le Clézio 2003: 375).8 But confronted with Catherine’s silence, Jean finds that the very idea of denying time in order to appropriate someone else’s memory has become a “childish game, pretending, acting as if there was nothing wrong, as if Catherine was not already disappearing” (Le Clézio 2003: 375).9 He knows that he is collecting memory in a vacuum and yet the bitter taste of knowing that to be true helps him to keep a critical sense, to remain aware of the material implications of the destruction and upheaval that now appear as an ironic reflection of the traveler-searcher’s ambitions. As Mbembe concludes his essay on postcolonial violence: “One only drops from existence to enter into that infinite time that is another piece of reality, the time of judgment” (Mbembe 2001: 205). Revolutions that form both the theme and the narrative structure of Le Clézio’s novel suggest a broad sense of historical judgment that absorbs the desired transcendent gaze of the traveler Jean Marro. Revolutions suggest a turning door and the inevitable transformation of peoples even if they seem to be turning around in a circle. The expulsion of Jean’s ancestors

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from the Mauritian property due to financial mismanagement and betrayal opens a door that will be henceforth impossible to shut again. Each departure, each displacement in the life of Jean, of his friends, and of his ancestors is an irreparable rupture and re-opening of space and time. Revolutions are the concrete and spatio-temporal representation of multiplicity, discovery, radical change and loss. All effort to hold back ruin and progress collapses when faced with the violence of the unstable time lived by Jean throughout his own life, the crises of the Nineteen Sixties and the memories of his traumatized family. When Jean looks at the only partner he will ever really love, the young Algerian woman Mariam, he says: “She has a very smooth face like a desert stone. […] She comes from nowhere, like Jean.” (Le Clézio 2003: 382)10 He later adds: It is a strange feeling, to be at the same time here and elsewhere, to belong to several stories at once. Mariam, the little girl from Oran, and the high school student here, waiting for her exams. Jean in London, but at the same time at Ébène [where the property named Rozilis was situated] in 1910, New Year’s day, when everything is about to fall into the realm of chance. And Aunt Catherine at Josaphat every night, her eyes wide open on that black empty space that has been inside her for twenty-five years (Le Clézio 2003: 383)11

It does seem a bit paradoxical for one to be from nowhere and yet to belong to several stories. When we realize that Jean was not even born in 1910, whereas Cathy, whose voice makes his sense of presence at Ébène possible, inhabits the empty, quasi-mortuary space of Josaphat, we begin to understand that being from nowhere is not really a stateless condition, but rather a form of freedom that affirms itself in spite of both rootedness and uprooting, yet while feeding on both. One is somewhere but one is also from nowhere. This is not an abstract transcendence, because the nowheres of Cathy, Mariam and Jean are historically linked and interdependent. Jean and Mariam meet in France but are connected by Jean’s refusal to be enlisted to kill Algerians; Cathy could not have given voice to her memories of Ébène without the young Niçois descendent who was ready to take tea with her in her stuffy apartment, and Jean cannot imagine himself in Ébène without Cathy’s lingering voice. The revolutions that give Le Clézio’s novel its name include the great founding revolutions of modernity, from the French Revolution to the Algerian War of Independence. But among them, Le Clézio has discretely inserted another global revolution that official historiography has tended to quietly pass over: the history of the maroons as a Pan-African revolution

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against slavery. Making allusion to the Haitian Revolution and to the restoration of slavery (after its abolition under the French Revolution in February 1794) in the colonies of the French other than Saint-Domingue, under the orders of Napoleon I, Le Clézio introduces a series of narratives told by Kiambe, a black female slave kidnapped in Mozambique and taken to Mauritius. She tells us about the betrayal and decapitation of the maroon commander Ratsitatane who had been her husband. A report on Ratsitatane’s execution, written by a local official named William Stone, reaches the following conclusion: one morning people noticed that Ratsitatane’s head had disappeared. According to a public rumour that went around, it was the maroons … who had carried it away to be used in magical practices and to foment more revolutions. But I heard it said that Ratsitatane’s head had been stolen by the men of the same Laïzaf [the man who betrayed him] and sold to an English apothecary named Richard Morris, who mummified it in alcohol as a part of his collection of rare curiosities. (Le Clézio 2003: 502-3)12

This written document, produced by a local official, would have us believe in the power of a written report to contain revolutions. The two possible fates of Ratsitatane’s head represent two possible directions for travel as a central figure of postcolonial globalisation, which could be defined in the context of Le Clézio’s writing as the unchecked, inevitable and ever increasing pursuit of the expulsion of recalcitrant and refractory identities from human consciousness. Either revolutions continue, inspired by the magic of a collective threat, or we return them to the imperial museum where the other is a “rare curiosity,” eminently passive under the gaze of the master. Le Clézio’s writing in general is an alterative writing: he constantly seeks to assume an identity that does not appear to belong to him. Christelle Sohy for example summarizes this principle in relation to the “feminine”: For the writer, to attempt to say and write the feminine is to initiate a discourse on the other or a discourse of the other. That would imply placing oneself in a position of exteriority that would account for sexual difference. But it seems to us that this attitude has never been that simple at the level of writing, and that sometimes the feminine seems to be said from the inside, to write itself, and that at that point the feeling of alterity is diminished. (Sohy 2010: 9-10)13

Whether or not it is true, as Sohy seems to believe in relation to gender alterity, that alterity can be “diminished” through the process of writing,

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when we turn to the question asked by the mummified head of Ratsitatane, the alterative literature of Le Clézio will not, and cannot offer any closure to the problem. It is precisely because the double possibility of an ongoing revolution and of a reduction to rare curiosity persists that the other survives its confiscation by postcolonial globalization. The involuntary travel of Kiambe is strategically placed at the end of Révolutions to suggest that her descendent Balkis needed to visit Kiambe and receive her blessing there, on Mauritius, before it was time for Jean to come and visit his “homeland.” This implied necessity of Balkis’s symbolic empowerment and presence raises serious doubts concerning the historical and moral meaning of the great journeys of both Jean Marro and his ancestor Jean Eudes Marro, not to mention modern revolutions in general. Laïzaf’s betrayal, Morris’s “curiosity” and the “I heard it said that” of William Stone, all suggest the ambiguity, if not the impossibility, of alterative travel as a morally convincing goal and of any kind of “littérature monde” that would in some way be washed clean of its own history. Rosélie in The Story of the Cannibal Woman is faced with another sort of conundrum, but one which is not less critical of historical experience, when she finally decides to enter the murdered academic’s once forbidden office. She had never entered the room since the violent and mysterious death that will ultimately be revealed as the awkward drama that it is: “Stephen mixed up with two boys, crudely fighting over possession of one of them!” (Condé 2007: 281)14 She sees in her own inability to open the drawers of the desk an act of cowardice symbolizing the illusion of the white saviour-defender that had been given to her and that she had kept intact for twenty years without ever really believing it. She had literally travelled the world for twenty years with a stranger for whom she had never been more than an intruder and a pretext. Rosélie is not only a traveler herself. She is a traveler-among-travelers who reproduces the positions and discourses of others apparently living out similar circumstances. Dawn Fulton comments on the novel’s critique of empty, consumerist travel as she describes “the recurring motif of the destructive tourist”: “in opposition to the nameless, anxious nomad is the pleasure-seeking traveler, a minority abroad who is nonetheless in a position of economic power with respect to the desired destination. Through Rosélie’s eyes the tourist is an agent of distortion and perversion, a damaging force that fundamentally transforms the historical and geographical landscape it enters.” (Fulton2008: 128)

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But the tourist in Condé’s novel is not only someone who pays for a two-week “African safari;” Rosélie is surrounded by individuals who travel around in a mental world of clichés, all the while claiming to be free individuals. Many of them, like her friend Simone, a Martinican woman married to a French consul, are convinced that they have learned the right mode of travel. Having read “all the classics of decolonization” (Condé 2007: 52), Simone analyzes the reasons why black South African school teachers and administrators show such disdain for the toys she and Rosélie (whom she has recruited as a Santa’s helper) go around delivering to several different primary schools: “We’re not white women. We are black. The whites, however, have brainwashed these people to such an extent that they not only loathe themselves but everything of the same color. What’s more, it’s the class struggle. Here we are in a luxury car. We don’t live in the townships. We’re bourgeois.” (Condé 2007: 52)15

Rosélie’s reaction to this analysis undercuts Simone’s travel narrative of the self. Simone has conveniently forgotten key elements of her own story; she came from a destitute family and village of Martinique (Condé 2007: 52-3). Rosélie foregrounds the resistance of her own life to such pre-programmed narratives of “intersectionality”: “Bourgeois? Speak for yourself. I live like a parasite. I don’t have a career. I don’t have any money or own any material or spiritual goods. I have neither a present nor a future.” (Condé 2007: 52).16 Rosélie sees people around her trying to make sense of their acceptance or lack of acceptance as they travel through cultural settings that are outside of themselves and that stubbornly refuse their selfrighteous meddling. These people follow fixed and often plainly inaccurate scripts. Although she feels powerless to write her own script, she is sure at least of the inadequacy of those she observes. As she ridicules the caricatural array of modern mixed-race couples who attend a birthday party for Bebe, a fashionable South African poet, we realize that Rosélie, unable to see any meaning in her one-sided transcultural relationship with Stephen, denies the possibility of any roadmap to global movement and co-existence. But it is Stephen, always the life of the party and the center of attention, who evokes “the greatest thinkers of our time” who claim, according to him, “that the world is in a state of hybridization.” (Condé 2007: 60) The theory behind Stephen’s erudite defence of the mixed-race couple is that “no individual is identical to another.” Mixed marriages should henceforth be accepted as matter-of-fact because all marriages are mixed

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in some way. Rosélie is not fully aware at this point in her life of the full extent of the oppression that her relationship with Stephen implies. Only his death and the revelation of his secret sexual life will enable Rosélie to understand her need to establish herself as an independent traveler capable of representing her own vision of the worlds she has traveled through. At the moment of Bebe’s party, she responds to Simone’s harsh judgment of Stephen’s self-centered showmanship “a little like a mother allowing for her son’s failings” (Condé 2007: 61). Yet the very use of such expressions to describe Rosélie’s leniency towards Stephen already suggests a moral discomfort that had always existed and continued to haunt her as she traveled with him, becoming ever more irremeably a stranger to herself. The underlying problem of Stephen’s analysis of a “post-racial,” “hybridized” global civilization is that everyone else in the room, and first and foremost his wife whom he carries beside him as what he sees as an empty signifier and a convenient trophy, is reduced to insignificance, all in the name of eliminating the significance of difference. Rosélie’s own parodic inventory of the mixed-race couples attending Bebe’s party is ambiguous because it is difficult to distinguish Rosélie’s own doubt as an emanation of self-doubt and Stephen’s influence over her worldview, an influence from which she does not fully free herself until after his death. As she later encounters the full dimensions of Stephen’s betrayal, she must face the question of how to approach the problem of travel now that her “guide” has disappeared, his guidance itself in disgrace: “Did she really want to leave Cape Town? To go where? And find what? The indifference of Paris? The emptiness of Guadeloupe? Who was she? Who did she want to be? A painter? A clairvoyant? She invariably ended up losing hope in her wrecked life.” (Condé 2007: 298)17 Rosélie is beginning to discover, in the last pages of the novel, the end of travel in the global postcolony. The métropole of Paris is indifferent because it no longer perceives itself as having a vocation to receive the peoples of its empire and the new francophonie is now a horizon of indifference and forgetting. Guadeloupe has, in Rosélie’s mind, been emptied of its value by the personal failure of her family and by the overwhelming effectiveness of exile in the twentieth century. We also see however that the end of travel is not only a question of space but also one of purpose. Rosélie will come to the conclusion that travel was a form of postponement. Staying in a place is not a discovery of home but a choice of being and an act of sexual and creative liberation. She will say to another suitor who invites her to accompany him to Spain: “I won’t go with you to Cadix. I’ve never liked traveling. It was Stephen who forced me and I obeyed. Now I want to do as I please.” (Condé 2007: 310)18 She

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had already reframed in her mind this commitment to no longer travel— what formerly would have been an act of obedience—in larger historical terms: She wouldn’t leave Cape Town. Suffering is equivalent to entitlement. She had earned this city. She had made it hers by reversing the journey of her ancestors, dispossessed of Africa, who had seen the isles loom up like a mirage to the fore of Columbus’s caravels, the isles where the cane and tobacco of their rebirth would germinate. (Condé 2007: 309)19

One could be excused for feeling a little surprised to hear a protagonist of Maryse Condé see a return to Africa by a Guadeloupian as a reversal of an ancestral journey, but the overall context of the novel, with Rosélie’s long imprisonment under the gaze of an oppressive white man, obliges us to consider the possibility that this trope of return is actually an allegory of individual struggle for sexual, racial and psychological freedom. Maryse Condé and J.-M. G. Le Clézio both signed the 2007 Manifesto “for a littérature monde en français,” “death warrant of francophonie” as its authors claimed (Le Monde 2007). They belong to the same generation and have as a common heritage insular origins (Guadeloupian and Mauritian). Both have lived in France, in Africa and in America (teaching in American universities), both have travelled widely. Without insisting on the necessity of the term “littérature monde,” it must be said that it is likely to become more and more urgent to reflect on the foundations of the geographic, historical and ideological chasm that one might believe to separate authors such as Le Clézio and Condé as authors of “hexagonal” and “francophone” origins. A good part of the problem probably lies in the word “origins” itself. The travelers of these two novels represent a form of writing that sits uncomfortably between two spaces: an intolerable space where they struggle in vain to “make themselves at home” and an inaccessible “land of origin,” that looks more and more like an illusion or a dream. Whether she lives in Paris, in N’Dossou, in New York, or in Cape Town, Rosélie will never know a space where she will be at home because her language, nationality, gender and race are for all those she meets, for one reason or another, fundamentally unacceptable. As Brinda Mehta explains, Condé’s travels “do not represent reality tours or cultural tourism” (Mehta 2009: 9). Nor does Condé ever subscribe to any notion of an original or authentic Africa as a basis for the definition of diaspora. As Dawn Fulton explains, Condé defends her artistic freedom by creating “narratives of identity quests” that are ‘almost but not quite’ the projected narrative of postcolonialism” (Fulton 2008: 13).

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In a comparable way, Le Clézio’s constant moving towards but never reaching the voice of the other necessarily positions itself as an “almost but not quite” representation of an imaginary renegotiated contract of shared identity among francophone writer-travelers. Jean Marro, the traveler of Révolutions, leaves France to avoid military service and the Algerian war, but in every country in which he attempts to dwell, the pseudo-communities he gathers around him fall apart as quickly as he forms them. According to Isa Van Acker, with Le Clézio “the encounter with the other appears as an ephemeral meeting that can only be assumed in the fragility of the moment” (Van Acker 2001: 210).20 On the other hand, Claude Cavallero notes that the polyphonic quality of Le Clézio’s writing has the effect of “diluting the charater’s quest in the quests of family groups, ethnicities and nations” (Cavallero 2009: 200). On might say that with Condé as much as with Le Clézio, the more questionable one’s origins become the more one needs them. That is not to say that origins can ever be reduced the nostalgic dream of lost travelers, no matter how stubbornly such dreams persist as much in the minds of the characters as in the mind of the critics who study them. But when one’s confidence in origins is shaken, one can begin to imagine microcommunities that constitute themselves on an ad-hoc basis to reflect critically on disappearing memories, on injustices that keep hanging on, on hopes that start to form. The danger is that in trying to think about what may be new in this mode of travel, we could jump to conclusions and believe that such journeys have never happened before. It may be precisely this refusal to forget completely the phantasms of the past that we still find seductive, and perhaps even necessary, in these stories.

Notes 1

« Le problème qui demeure est celui du genre lui-même, dans la mesure où les conditions et la conception même du voyage se sont considérablement modifiées en quelques décennies : évolution des moyens de transport, développement considérable des déplacements, qui saturent la quasi-totalité de la planète, remplacement progressif de l’exploration proprement dite par le tourisme. À quoi il faut ajouter la conséquence la plus redoutable de ces phénomènes : la disparation progressive des différences culturelles, à profit d’une uniformité planétaire qui semble rendre tout déplacement inutile. » 2 In his discussion of travel in L’Émile, Rousseau emphasizes the general importance of travel for a more enlightened society, but also argues that thoughtless travel is worse than useless: “When a man returns from travelling about the world, he is what he will be all his life; there are more who return bad than good, because there are more who start with an inclination towards evil. In the course of their travels, young people, ill-educated and ill-behaved, pick up all the

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vices of the nations among whom they have sojourned, and none of the virtues with which those vices are associated; but those who, happily for themselves, are well-born, those whose good disposition has been well cultivated, those who travel with a real desire to learn, all such return better and wiser than they went.” 3 « Sauf des garnements qui m’ont jeté des pierres, puis se sont sauvés en riant. » 4 « Alors moi, je pars à reculons, comme un voleur. Je ne sais plus ce que je suis venu faire ici. Quand on est seul, qu’on arrive de loin, peut-être qu’on croit aux miracles, sous prétexte qu’on a suivi des cours dans un hôpital à Londres. » 5 « Ce roman est une belle illustration de cette littérature de nostalgie où le passé est un espace de valeurs et de rêves. » 6 « malgré le caractère fragmenté, éclaté du récit, sa cohérence est assurée par la perception spécifique d’un narrateur qui se substitue à la plupart de ses personnages en disant ‘je’ à leur place ; » 7 « c’était comme de mourir, comme les ébéniers et les bois noirs qu’on allait abattre. » 8 « C’est elle qui avait appris à Jean que le temps ne compte pas, que c’est une invention des horlogers, un mauvais prétexte. » 9 « Jean sent parfois les larmes dans ses yeux, à vouloir continuer ce jeu puéril, faire semblant, faire comme si de rien n’était, comme si Catherine n’était pas en train de disparaître. » 10 « Elle a un visage très lisse comme une pierre … Elle est de nulle part, comme Jean. » 11 « C’est un sentiment bizarre, être à la fois ici et ailleurs, appartenir à plusieurs histoires. Mariam, petite fille à Oran, et lycéenne ici, en attente de ses examens. Jean à Londres, mais en même temps à Ébène en 1910, le jour de l’An, quand tout va basculer dans le hasard. Et la tante Catherine à Josaphat, chaque nuit, les yeux ouverts sur ce vide noir qui est en elle depuis vingt-cinq ans. » 12 « un matin l’on vit que la tête de Ratsitatane avait disparu. La rumeur publique se répandit que c’étaient les marrons….qui l’avaient emportée afin de pratiquer une magie et fomenter d’autres révolutions. Mais j’ai entendu dire que la tête de Ratsitatane avait été volée par les hommes du même Laïzaf et vendue à l’apothicaire anglais Richard Morris, qui l’avait conservée momifiée dans l’alcool parmi sa collection de curiosités rares. » 13 « Pour l’écrivain, entreprendre de dire et écrire le féminin, c’est amorcer un discours sur l’autre ou un discours de l’autre. Ce serait se placer dans une position d’extériorité qui rendrait compte de la différence sexuelle. Or il nous a semblé que cette attitude n’était jamais aussi simple au niveau de l’écriture, que parfois le féminin semble être dit de l’intérieur, s’écrire lui-même et que le sentiment de l’altérité s’estompe. » 14 « Stephen entre deux gamins, se battant vulgairement pour la possession de l’un d’entre eux. » (Condé 2003 : 287) 15 « - Nous ne sommes pas blanches. Nous sommes noires. Or, les Blancs leur ont tellement lavé la tête qu’ils se méprisent et méprisent tout ce qui est de leur couleur. En plus, c’est la lutte des classes. Nous arrivons en voiture de luxe. Nous n’habitons pas les townships. Nous sommes des bourgeoises. » (Condé 2003: 62-3)

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16

« Bourgeoise ? Parle pour toi. Moi, je vis en parasite. Je ne possède ni carrière. Ni fortune. Ni biens matériels. Ni biens spirituels. Ni présent. Ni avenir. » (Condé 2003: 63) 17 « Désirait-elle vraiment quitter Le Cap ? Pour aller où ? Retrouver quoi ? L’indifférence de Paris ? Le désert de Guadeloupe ? Qui était-elle ? Qui voulaitelle être ? Un peintre ? Un médium ? Elle finissait invariablement par se désespérer de sa vie saccagée. » (Condé 2003: 303) 18 « - Je n’irai pas à Cadix avec vous. Je n’ai jamais aimé les voyages. C’est Stephen qui m’y entraînait et j’obéissais. Maintenant, je ne veux faire qu’à ma volonté. » (Condé 2003: 316) 19 « Elle ne quitterait pas Le Cap. Souffrance vaut titre. Cette ville, elle l’avait gagnée. Elle l’avait faite sienne en un mouvement inverse de ses ancêtres dépossédés d’Afrique, qui avaient vu surgir, tel un mirage à l’avant des caravelles de Colomb, les îlots où ils feraient germer la canne et le tabac de leur renaissance. » (Condé 2003: 315) 20 « la rencontre avec l’autre se dessine comme une éphémère mise en présence qui demande à être assumée dans la fragilité de l’instant. »

References Anoun, Abdelhaq. J-M. G. Le Clézio : Révolutions ou l’appel intérieur des origines. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. Cavallero, Claude. Le Clézio témoin du monde. Paris: Calliopées, 2009. Cogez, Gérard. Les écrivains voyageurs au XXe siècle. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 2004. Condé, Maryse. L’histoire de la femme cannibale. Paris: Mercure de France, 2003. —.The Story of the Cannibal Woman. R. Philcox, trans. New York: Atria, 2007. Fulton, Dawn. Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Le Clézio, J.-M. G. Révolutions. Paris: Gallimard. 2003. Marin, Louis. Utopiques : Jeux d’espaces. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1973. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkley: University of California Press, 2001. Mehta, Brinda. Notions of Identity, Diaspora and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing. New York : Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Le Monde. March 16, 2007. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. L’Émile. Project Gutenberg. S Harris et al. Posted: September 26, 2011; www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5427

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Sohy, Michelle. Le féminin chez J.-M. G. Le Clézio. Paris: Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2010. Van Acker, Isa. “Polyphonie et altérité dans Onitsha et Étoile errante,” Thamyris/Intersecting 8 (2001): 201-210.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE IN GISÈLE PINEAU’S L’ESPÉRANCE MACADAM VÉRONIQUE MAISIER SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

From her first novel La Grande Drive des esprits (1993) [The Drifting of Spirits, 1999] to her more recent autobiographical essay Mes quatre femmes (2007), Gisèle Pineau has shown an interest in cases of loss of speech resulting from a traumatic event. Pineau’s second novel L’Espérance macadam (1995) [Macadam Dreams, 2003] is no exception which depicts characters such as Angela who silently endures incestuous relations with her father Rosan for six years. Angela is too scared to denounce her father, and her “silence reflects her impossible situation, caught between dread of her mother’s displeasure and terror of her father, who seems to the child to be metamorphosed into a demon at nightfall” (Ormerod Noakes 2003: 143-44). Another character loses her ability to speak and starts “yapping all day long” (43)1, after her adoptive mother attaches her to a rope in the backyard. Finally, Macadam Dreams’ main character, Eliette Florentine, stops talking for three years after being brutally raped by her father. When Eliette’s mother, Seraphine, finds TiCyclone in the act of raping their eight year old daughter, she cuts off one of his ears, making him partially deaf to the screams that Eliette can no longer utter. Through these violent acts, the girl’s voice is twice rendered inaudible. Seraphine’s repetitive comments about Eliette’s aphasia show the traumatic impact on the young girl’s physical and mental state: “it had wounded her in the head and the belly [...]. All she could do was tremble, her teeth chattering out phenomenal fear” (88). Even though Eliette eventually regains her voice, she remains eager to spend the rest of her life “far from the world’s knocks and bumps” (5). She finds it difficult to socialize, and her “inability to adapt and to talk without fear to her neighbors indicates that she remains, at least metaphorically, aphasic. Her

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voice is stifled” (Kalisa 2005: 113). Aphasic, traumatized, and unable to denounce their oppressors, these girls are powerless to stop the abuses. They have been silenced. The neighbors and community at large equally keep silent and refuse to interfere while witnessing much of the abuse. Unwilling to get involved, they cover up the crimes by lying, telling stories, or by turning up the volume of the radio to drown the sounds of violence. As Lorna Milne aptly remarks: Likewise, the refusal -or inability- to name violence (to overcome the taboo of ‘that’s not something you talk about’) by victims and witnesses who rely on non-explanation, metaphor and lies, and who even (like the young Éliette) lose the power of speech, can all be linked to the effects of traumatic shock and repression, both in the past and in the present. (2007: 201)

Macadam Dreams thus describes the existence of a few inhabitants of Savane, a poor Guadeloupean neighborhood, and challenges the notions of silence and communication. Emphasizing the need for victims to speak out, the novel is a means to communicate what has been unsaid because, in the author’s words: “I think that it is essential for a writer to confront taboos, to denounce ... to write against violence” (Anglade 2003: 9, my translation).2 Macadam Dreams condemns both the violence and the silence that allow the oppression to continue. The first part of this study examines the ways in which, even though the novel’s written pages are intrinsically as mute as the victims, Pineau successfully fills them with sounds, indicating in the process that sounds can emerge from silence.

Writing Screams In his well-known Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 2001], Martinican writer Aimé Césaire evokes “this inert town, this squalling throng, [...] this throng detoured from its cry of hunger, of poverty, of revolt, of hatred, this throng so strangely chattering and mute” (3).3 The possibility of a coexistence between “chattering and mute” is reclaimed by Pineau with the presence in her novel of oxymorons such as “silent [...] roar” (7) and “silent cries” (16). As an echo to Césaire’s town, Pineau creates the ghetto of Savane, “filled with vain words and imprecations, with silences and cries that slowly gave way to the rhythm of hands beating furiously on a drum on some distant hill” (49-50). Sentences that combine screams with silence for instance “the cries that echoed in the silence left by Cyclone’s great

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winds” (2); “It ruffled her to hear the silence coming from my cabin” (21); and “my door, which was closed to the screaming silence over Rosette’s way” (48)- challenge the definition of silence as an absence of sound. Macadam Dreams’ narrative weaves Eliette’s stream of consciousness with Rosette’s (Angela’s mother), and to a lesser extent with Angela’s and Rosan’s. Going back and forth between these characters’ subjectivities, the narrative extensively investigates the mechanisms at play in sexual violence. Spatially separated by a few feet and a couple of thin walls, the characters engage in a silent dialogue so that the narration in effect negotiates and reclaims a communication that does not actually take place. The characters individually rehash the past, looking for clues to determine how they ended up in their current situation. Their memories engender a chassé-croisé of episodes as if they were talking with each other. For instance, Eliette, Rosette and Rosan recall Glawdys who threw her baby over a bridge a few years back. Eliette remembers how Rosan had “scoop[ed] up the poor little bloodstained body. He walked through Quartier-Mélo [...], displaying the martyred lamb to all so that it would not be forgotten” (49). Rosette in turn recalls a few pages later, how “Rosan had carried the little lamb” (54), and Rosan also evokes this moment when “[h]e’d carried the mangled baby through all the tracks of Savane so that everyone could judge and weigh the hell of the world, it’s [sic] damnation” (183). Their thoughts echo each other and doing so partake in the orality of the novel, along with the conversational tone that renders the characters’ thought processes. A look at the first page of the novel shows the conversational style typical of this narrative mode: Nothing worthwhile was left. Only garbage. Not even a board standing, or a sheet of tin roofing in place. Ruins of shanties. Memories of the paths that ran through the heart of Savane. Not a birdsong or the hint of a feather in the broken arms of the trees that had fallen to their knees. (1)4

Many sentences are grammatically incomplete, lack a subject, and occasionally the verb. The “ne” which constitutes the first part of the negation in French is systematically dropped as happens frequently in rapid conversations. Finally, a few sentences are truncated, and simply reduced to a couple of words. Repetitions of sentences from one paragraph to the next likewise show a lack of organization that is typical of conversations: It is indeed unusual to repeat once or twice a sentence already mentioned in writing. This repetition, very frequent when speaking, plays nevertheless

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References to the tales that Rosette tells to her daughter,6 to the local gossip rampant in Savane, or to Caribbean music with the mention of singers such as Bob Marley, Tosh, and Gregory Isaacs, all contribute to the emergence of a noisy, chattering neighborhood. Lyrics of songs by Gratien Midonet and Prince Jazzbo are quoted in Creole and in English respectively. Old Creole beguines such as “Ti Ninon mwen” (30), reggae songs, “boisterous zouk” (176) and Eugene Mona’s flute are aired on the radio while a drummer -a “tanbouyè” (193)- seems to be constantly playing in the background. These noises participate in a proliferation of sounds reverberating throughout Savane. The characters cannot escape this loud environment, and the readers cannot not perceive the sounds that appear so insistently on Pineau’s pages. Indeed, even when screams cannot be heard, a few instances of synesthesia found in Macadam Dreams make them visible. Color synesthesia, by which a person perceives a sound or a vowel as a specific color, prevents Eliette from ignoring the sounds of violence in her neighborhood, even though she keeps her “eyes and ears shut,” and does her best to “not let her mind color the sounds” (2). Colors, sounds and silence impose themselves when she sees a group of young men whose hair “reddened from the sun, stuck up in a riot and let out a kind of silent, tragic and magnificent, yet desperate roar” (7). Synesthesia is likewise present in Eliette’s description of Glawdys as a baby who “was already babbling in a voice that could have been imagined in bright colors” (41). When Glawdys is tethered to a rope, she loses her colors at the same time as her voice is replaced with barking. The loss of speech is consistently posited as a consequence of violence and abuse. If synesthesia renders the screams visible, onomatopoeias make them audible. The onomatopoeia “tocotoc tocotoc,” -or “clonk, clonk, clonk” and “knock-knock-knock” in translation- captures the sound of a conch shell hitting a character’s head. Similarly, “blogodo blogodo” (91) renders the shaking of a cabin, “plakatak plakatak” (95) evokes the beating of wings on a tin roof; and finally “cra-cra-cra!” (206) represents Aunt Anoncia’s bitter laugh.7 The sounds produced are further expressed by verbs such as to ring, to rap, to sound that accompany the characters’ actions. Interjections also frequently occur and add to the oral quality of Pineau’s text by making its dialogues more vivid and audible. These interjections—“alas!” (41, 43, 65); “Save me, sweet Jesus!” (54); “blip!” (62); “Jah! Jah!” (112); “cursed dreams!” (175); “Not at all!” (214)— typically vocalize the characters’ reaction to a situation or their anger

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towards other characters, typically verbalized in insults like “the great gobbler!” (la grande agoulou!) (41); and “Rogues! Flea-bitten curs! Heathens! Beggarers! Bare-assed manawa-whores! Ratbags!” (54). One of Pineau’s most effective techniques for adding sound to the page, however, is the recourse to internal rhymes. Even though Macadam Dreams is written in prose, it acquires poetic and oral traits through the alliterations and assonances found in numerous sentences. Many colloquial expressions show a correspondence of sounds between the endings of two or more words: “cette misère, roche de fer” (68) (“hard licks, lead brick” 62); la “gloriole mariolle” (69) (“highfaluting horn tooting” 64); “son Django coco-merlo” (72) (“that low Django gigolo of hers” 66); and “le pays d’Amérique détrousseur, usurpateur, conquistador, enchanteur, matador” (75) (“the whole swindling, usurping, domineering, tantalizing, daring land of America” 70).8 The internal rhymes create sound repetitions or echoes in the space of a few syllables, and generate an upbeat tempo that adds an almost explosive quality to the text. These repetitions constitute as many “bomb[s] made of ink and written over words well organized onto a white page” (50, my translation).9 Pineau’s mention of bombs and the sounds rising from her text evoke Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s description of what he called the “nation language” as “an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machinegun or the wind or a wave” (13). In the context of Anglophone poetry in the Caribbean region, Brathwaite explains how the nation language—that is a Caribbean English distinct from standard English—is necessary to “get a rhythm which approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience” of the Caribbeans (1984: 10, emphasis in the text). The Barbadian poet goes on to say: The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song. That is to say, the noise that it makes is part of the meaning, and if you ignore the noise (or what you would think of as noise, shall I say) then you lose part of the meaning. (17, emphasis in the text)

Pineau’s novel is based on sounds, songs and screams; noise is at its very center. In a 2003 interview, Pineau defines Macadam Dreams as “the scream, the novel that has to be written” (Makward 2003: 1212, my translation).10 Macadam Dreams is a roman engagé, written to denounce sexual violence, and to give a voice to the victims:

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Pineau relates the victims’ experiences from their point of view, and adopts a language close to that of the Guadeloupean characters she is depicting, that is to say she writes in a language that oscillates between French and Creole. In order to “stay as close, as true as possible to [her] characters,” she declares to Chantal Anglade that she finds it necessary to write and create a text that is between French and Creole, based on [her] personal experiences, and in the spirit of both languages. [She] feel[s] strongly influenced by the Creole language, by its poetry, its rhythms, its sounds. (2003: 3, my translation)11

The hybrid language resulting from Pineau’s experiences is not devoid of consequences, especially since it situates the issues of incest and of sexual violence more explicitely in the context of a Guadeloupean community. As Pascale DeSouza remarks, “the situation of diglossia which characterizes the French West Indies presents the Guadeloupean and Martinican writers with a linguistic choice charged with heavy political and economic implications” (1995: 173, my translation).12 We will now examine a few of these implications as they relate to the screams produced in the ghetto of Savane.

“Crier” or “Kriyé”? A thorough analysis of the presence and distribution of French and Creole in Pineau’s text would reveal its linguistic diversity as well as an apparent lack of consistency in the author’s treatment of Creole. In Macadam Dreams, no glossary is used at the end of the text, no translation is offered in footnotes, and no explanation is provided within the narration. However, Creole words present in the text are sometimes translated, and sometimes not; they are sometimes italicized, but not always; and their spelling often corresponds to a Creole spelling, but not consistently. Pineau does not use one systematic approach but rather a variety of techniques to incorporate the Creole language more or less visibly in her text. This variety does not treat languages as separate and compact groups of words but allows for flexibility, and replaces the linear binaries— standard French versus Guadeloupean Creole—with a more complex, and fluid language. Françoise Lionnet’s comments regarding the situation of the English language in the English-speaking Caribbean nations certainly

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applies to the Francophone islands as well, and to Pineau’s writing in particular: Linguists increasingly agree that the language situation no longer fits the binary model of “bilingualism” or “diglossia” that used to be applied to the region. There is in fact a linguistic “continuum” that allows speakers to vary their speech along the spectrum from Standard English at one pole to what is known as “Broad Creole” at the other [...]. (1995: 31)

Pineau’s versatile approach to representations of Creole is manifest in the distribution of the noun “cri” and of the verb “crier” in Macadam Dreams. To transmit the screams of Savane, Pineau quite simply repeats the word “cri” and the verb “crier” throughout the novel.13 The noun “cri” appears 22 times, and the verb “crier” is used 66 times in various grammatical tenses. Derivatives such as “s’écrier,” “décrier,” “criard” or “crieur” occur an additional 15 times. These uses add up to 103 occurrences in a novel of 219 pages, so that on average, a form of “cri” is found almost once every other page. This omnipresence of the “cris” takes part in the profusion of sounds produced in Savane and reflects the prevalence of violence in Eliette’s neighborhood. Used 17 times in the plural form, the “cris” seem to proliferate. As if possessing a life of their own, they act as subjects of verbs depicting violent actions: they pierce, they pound, slash open the night, and pursue the characters. Produced by people, objects, and animals, their pervasiveness builds up to produce one collective scream in which even the cats protest vehemently: “A broom was chasing a cat that was squawking bloody murder” (146), or in French: “Un chat poursuivi par un balai cria à l’assassinat” (150). This usage of “crier” does not correspond to a standard French definition but rather to a Creole usage of the verb “kriyé,” defined by Henry Tourneux and Maurice Barbotin in Le Dictionnaire pratique du Créole de Guadeloupe (2009) as: “screaming, producing a typical scream (animal)” (218). Tourneux and Barbotin further illustrate the definition with the following example: “Chat-la ka kriyé: le chat miaule” (the cat meows). In fact, if the verb “crier” appears 66 times in Macadam Dreams, only 32 of its uses conform with a standard French definition while its other uses correspond to Creole definitions of “kriyé” such as “to call out for someone,” “to name someone,” and “to produce a typical scream for an animal.”14 Yet, in the case of “crier,” Pineau uses the standard French and the Creole verbs without distinguishing between them, using the same spelling, regardless of language and definitions.

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The Creole verb occurs with the meaning “to send for someone” in sentences like: “Faut crier Eliot Ness!” (15) (“Call Eliot Ness!” 8); and “Elle le criait pour aller chercher de l’eau” (82) (“She yelled at him to fetch the water” 77). The verb is most often found however with the meaning “to name or nickname a person or a place.” Sentences such as “Autrefois on criait cet endroit: Savane Mulet” (23) (“In the old days, we called this place Savane Mulet” 16); and “Eusèbe, que tout le monde criait Zébio” (67) (“Eusèbe, whom everyone cried Zébio from his early childhood” 61) insist on the role of the community—represented by the collective pronoun “we” and the indefinite “everyone”—in establishing the identity of a person or claiming ownership of a place. Another example stresses the distance that exists between the standard French verb “appeler” and the Creole verb “crier” in order to name a person. When Rosette thinks about her husband Rosan, she makes a distinction between the two verbs: “ce Nègre-là qu’on criait Rosan, que j’appelais mon prince” (197) (“that nigger everyone called Rosan, the one I called my prince” 192). On the one hand, the name given by the community “Rosan” belongs with the Creole verb “crier”; on the other hand, the name associated with the French verb “appeler” comes from Rosette who found it in French history books and “French fairy tales” (182).15 The Creole verb with the meaning “to insult someone”16 is also found in a few sentences like “Elle m’a criée impudente” (11) (“She cried me impudent” 3); and “je la criais vorace et la toisais” (167) (“I called her voracious and looked down on her” 162). A final usage of “crier” possibly offers an example of the linguistic crossings that take place in the Caribbean region. In the sentence, “on n’avait pas crié sur des morts violentes et des assassinats depuis l’histoire des Rastas partis dans la montagne” (162) (“a violent death or killing had not been deplored since the unfortunate fate of the Rastas in the mountains” 158), the verb appears to be close to the English verb “to cry,” and might result from a shift from French or Creole towards the English language, introduced through the influence of reggae songs. In particular, Bob Marley’s song “No woman no cry” is mentioned 16 times in the novel, and its lyrics are quoted on several occasions.17 This brief examination of the verb “crier” shows how effectively the author’s “nation language” conveys her message about sounds, rhythms and screams, while at the same time adding noise to that message. We have so far used the term “noise” to refer to the sounds produced either by the characters and their environment, or by the written text itself. Yet another meaning corresponds to what Françoise Lionnet identifies as “an interference in the text”:

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Creole can function as “noise” in the alienated discourse of the assimilated subject [...]. The vernacular mother tongue will produce interferences in the text, interferences that only a reader trained to recognize the— sometimes duplicitous, sometimes obvious—use of the vernacular, and receptive to its message, will not dismiss as “noise.” (1995: 35-6)

Lionnet turns to Michel Serres’s example of a phone call interrupting a dinner conversation to illustrate the articulations at play between “message” and “noise”: on one level it [the ringing telephone] is random, unwelcome noise; but by answering the phone, I receive a message in its own right, a message with which the dinner table conversation interferes because it will now function as noise (ibid., italics in the text)

The Creole uses of the verb “crier” act as such interferences, sometimes obvious, sometimes duplicitous, and sometimes troubling. The language variations should not be ignored or dismissed as parasitic noise because they are an integral part of the scream produced in and by Macadam Dreams. Creole idioms and expressions exist in the text as interferences which destabilize the readers in the same way that the characters are destabilized by the noises and the crimes of Savane. The malaise created by these interferences augments with the increasing opacity since “by opacifying his/her text, the writer forces the reader, firstly to experience the difficulty of being of the protagonists, and secondly to question the capacity of the language to express reality” (DeSouza 1995: 182, my translation).18 At the same time, however, the linguistic wealth manifest in these language variations expresses the reality of Guadeloupe’s and of the Caribbean region’s heteroglossia and remains close to the characters’ daily experiences. Macadam Dreams addresses the issues of communication and responsibility—at the individual and community levels—in a context where it becomes necessary to face painful or unpleasant secrets, reject taboos, and confront past traumas. Pineau examines the possibility of communicating in an environment where silence in the face of injustice or violence has historically been the rule: “And today I ask how we, who have inherited all these unspoken issues ... how we can communicate?” (Veldwatcher 2004: 181-83) This question which undoubtedly echoes Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay titled “Can the Subaltern speak?” encompasses considerations such as self-determination, self-reliance, and solidarity. Gisèle Pineau’s novel manages to force sounds and noise out of its pages in order to give a voice to the subalterns, and emphasizes the

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importance of listening to screams, to silence, and to silent or silenced screams so that the subalterns can be heard, whether they can speak or not.

Notes 1

Unless otherwise indicated, the English quotations are from C. Dickson’s translation of L’Espérance macadam. 2 “Je pense qu’il est essentiel pour un auteur de lever les tabous, de dénoncer ... d’écrire contre la violence.” Pineau insists on the urgency she feels to write against taboos: “L’Espérance-macadam [sic] relates the violence that is done to women and girls. I have met many people who were victims of incest and it is an injury about which, as a woman, I couldn’t keep silent” (Veldwatcher 2004: 181). 3 “Cette ville inerte, cette foule criarde, [...] cette foule à côté de son cri de faim, de misère, de révolte, de haine, cette foule si étrangement bavarde et muette” (9). 4 “Restait rien de bon. Que des immondices. Y avait pas même une planche debout, une tôle en place. Vestiges de cases. Souvenirs de chemins qui perçaient au cœur de Savane. Y avait plus ni ramage ni plumage aux bras cassés des arbres tombés à genoux” (9). 5 “Il n’est certes pas d’usage à l’écrit de répéter une ou deux fois la phrase déjà dite. Ce procédé, très utilisé à l’oral, joue malgré tout indéniablement un rôle dans la redondance de nos messages oraux.” 6 The tale of “Lady Dreams” (120, 142, 172), the tale of “Laugh and Cry” (160-61, 175, 180), and the tale of “Cyclone who lost one eye in the sea” (53, 171-72). 7 In her article “Challenges to Writing Literature in Creole,” Jane Brooks explains the use of onomatopoeias in Creole as substitutes for adverbs: “Recourse to onomatopoeia is common in the oral variety in order to communicate the manner in which an action takes place, hence there are few adverbs in creole. In the written code, this onomatopoeic function is lost and the writer may need to develop a more or less new grammatical category. How to do this is not preordained and, in the initial stages of elaborating a written code, there may be as many solutions as there are writers” (1999: 129). 8 Other examples include: “Dérobades, aussi. Tremblades, cacades et reculades” (78) (“Fears. Contriving too. Cowering, collywobbles, and cold feet” 73); and “Alentour c’était saccage, ravage et valdingage” (96) (“All around was wheeling, reeling, head-over-heeling” 91). 9 “[...] comme une bombe d’encre sur des paroles bien alignées dessus une page blanche” (50). The comparison “comme une bombe d’encre” describes the devastating effect that the mention of Glawdys’s name has in a conversation. 10 In the author’s words: “L’Espérance macadam qui arrive deux ans après [La Grande Drive des esprits], c’est le cri, le roman nécessaire.” 11 “[...] il s’agit d’écrire, de forger un texte entre Français et Créole, à partir de mon vécu, dans l’esprit des deux langues. Je me sens très fortement imprégnée de la langue créole, de sa poésie, de ses rythmes, de ses sons.”

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12

“La situation de diglossie qui caractérise les Antilles françaises ouvre aux romanciers guadeloupéens et martiniquais un choix linguistique présentant de lourdes implications politiques et économiques.” 13 In the novel’s English translation, the terms “cri” and “crier” are variously translated as “cries,” “screams,” “yells,” “roars,” etc. so that their omnipresence is less striking. I will keep using the French terms “cri” and “crier” in the rest of this study since their repetition and visibility are at the heart of my argument. 14 Dictionnaire du créole de Marie-Galante by Maurice Barbotin, Dictionnaire pratique du créole de Guadeloupe by Henry Tourneux and Maurice Barbotin, Dictionnaire élémentaire français-créole by Pierre Pinalie, and Dictionnaire créole français by Ralph Ludwig, Danièle Montbrand, Hector Poullet, Sylviane Telchid. 15 Moreover, the “là” attached to “ce Nègre” in the French text “ce Nègre-là” despite the accent on the vowel “a” which marks it as a French particle used to reinforce the demonstrative adjective “ce”- can also correspond to the Creole definite article typically added behind the noun, as in “boug-la” or “moun-la” for instance. 16 Barbotin gives the following example: “Pa kriyé mwen méchan” (136) which we translate as “don’t call me mean” (ne me traitez pas de méchant). 17 Pineau mentioned in an interview that Macadam Dreams was written “while listening to Bob Marley, every day, for two years, No woman, no cry” (Anglade 2003: 9, my translation). In Pineau’s words: “en écoutant Bob Marley, tous les jours, pendant deux années, No woman no cry.” 18 “En opacifiant son texte, l’écrivain contraint le lecteur, d’une part à vivre la difficulté d’être des protagonistes, d’autre part à s’interroger sur l’adéquation du langage à rendre compte de la réalité” (DeSouza 1995: 182).

References Anglade, Chantal. “Les Femmes des Antilles chuchotent beaucoup dans les cuisines.” Entretien avec Gisèle Pineau. Septembre 2003. December 2013. Barbotin, Maurice. Dictionnaire du créole de Marie-Galante. Hamburg: Buske, 1995. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon Books, 1984. Brooks, Jane. “Challenges to Writing Literature in Creole.” An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing. Guadeloupe and Martinique. Sam Haigh, ed. Oxford: Berg, 1999. 119-34. Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. (1939) Paris: Editions Présence Africaine, 1983.

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—. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. DeSouza, Pascale. “Inscription du créole dans les textes francophones. De la citation à la créolisation.” Penser la créolité. Maryse Condé and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, eds. Paris: Editions Karthala, 1995. 173-90. Hazaël-Massieux, Marie-Christine. Ecrire en créole. Oralité et écriture aux Antilles. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993. Kalisa, Chantal. “Space, Violence and Knowledge in Gisèle Pineau’s L’Espérance-macadam.” Discursive Geographies: Writing Space and Place in French. Géographies discursives: L’Écriture de l’espace et du lieu en français. Jeanne Garane, ed. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 10317. Lionnet, Françoise. “‘Of Mangoes and Maroons’: Language, History, and the Multicultural Subject in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng.” Postcolonial Representations. Women, Literature, Identity. Françoise Lionnet, ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. 22-47. Ludwig, Ralph, et. al. Dictionnaire créole français. Paris: Editions Jasors, 2002. Makward, Christiane. “Entretien avec Gisèle Pineau.” The French Review 76.6 (May 2003): 1202-15. Milne, Lorna. “Sex, Violence and Cultural Identity in the Work of Gisèle Pineau.” Postcolonial Violence, Culture and Identity in Francophone Africa and the Antilles. Lorna Milne, ed. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. 191-212. Ormerod Noakes, Beverley. “The Parent-Child Relationship in Gisèle Pineau’s Work.” The Francophone Caribbean Today. Literature, Language, Culture. Gertrud Aub-Buscher and Beverley Ormerod Noakes, eds. Mona, Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press, 2003. 137-50. Pinalie, Pierre. Dictionnaire élémentaire français-créole. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. Pineau, Gisèle. La Grande Drive des esprits. (1993) Paris: Groupe Privat/Le Rocher, 2007. —. L’Espérance macadam. (1995) Paris: Editions HC, 2006. —. Macadam Dreams. Translated by C. Dickson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. —. Mes Quatre femmes. Paris: Philippe Rey, 2007. Serres, Michel. Le Parasite. Paris: Grasset, 1980.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. London: Macmillan, 1988. 271-313. Thomas, Bonnie. Breadfruit or Chestnut? Gender Construction in the French Caribbean Novel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Tourneux, Henry and Maurice Barbotin. Le Dictionnaire pratique du créole de Guadeloupe. Paris: Editions Khartala, 2009. Veldwatcher, Nadège. “An Interview with Gisèle Pineau.” Research in African Literatures 35:1 (Spring 2004): 180-86.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART AND MARIE-CÉLIE AGNANT AS « INTERPRÈTES » OF CARIBBEAN ORALITY GLORIA NNE ONYEOZIRI UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972), translated as The Bridge of Beyond (1974), and Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le livre d’Emma (2001) are remarkable examples of the representation and interpretation of women’s conversation, within the broader context of orality as both a written and spoken expression of cultural and social discourse by African and Caribbean women. While The Bridge of Beyond gives us insight into the way a community of women can be represented through its oral traditions, Le livre d’Emma affords us a further view of the interpretative problems that have arisen since the publication of The Bridge of Beyond, as the notion of oral tradition itself has become a sight of struggle between narratives of African and Caribbean identity and the questioning of identities that claim to be rooted in tradition. We will argue that problems and complexities surrounding the notion of orality in relation to women’s writing are to a great extent already present in the intricately arranged conversations of The Bridge of Beyond, though those problems will be more explicitly theorized through the paradoxical representation of Emma’s voice and oral witness through what will be called her book. In this sense, both Schwarz-Bart and Agnant may be seen as “interprètes” of orality: both as performers of a worldview in which they participate and seeker-providers of greater understanding of that worldview. As Flore, the professional translator hired by the psychiatrist Doctor MacLeod to translate for Emma who refuses to speak French, states: “The words come not from my brain to reach my lips, but from my stomach. I am no longer simply an interpreter. Little by little, I give up my [official] role, I become a part of Emma, I espouse Emma’s destiny”

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(Agnant 2004: 19).1 In the same way, neither Schwarz-Bart nor Agnant is simply an interpreter of the words they remember and reproduce; they are attempting to appropriate and express the collective experience of their characters as something that is a part of their own destiny. Though the collective orality of The Bridge of Beyond sometimes conveys a highly patriarchal view of women, the initial planks of that collective orality’s platform are built on Lougandor matriarchy: an oral poetry of plenitude in which Toussine, a woman with little economic or political power, makes her stand on a symbolic space of completeness. This imagery carries over to very end of Télumée’s life, when she says in her famous opening lines: And if I could choose it’s here in Guadeloupe that I’d be born again, suffer and die. Yet not long back my ancestors were slaves on this volcanic, hurricane-swept, mosquito-ridden, nasty-minded island. But I didn’t come into the world to weigh the world’s woe. I prefer to dream, on and on, standing in my garden, just like any other old woman of my age, till death comes and takes me as I dream, me and all my joy. (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 2)2

Renée Larrier has pointed out the importance of orality in the struggle for emancipation of African and Caribbean women. She also emphasizes the active and strategic role that women have played in the preservation, growth and dynamics of oral genres in Africa and the Caribbean. In her analysis of Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond, Larrier points out several narrative elements that bring this narrative in line with oral practices that she has observed in the Contes d’initiation feminine du pays Bassa by Werewere Liking and Marie-Josée Hourantier, including the autodiegetic woman narrator representing a community of women and the transmission from one generation to another of a knowledge grounded in orality (Larrier 2000: 56). Just as female initiation is carried out, at every stage of the narrative, under the supervision of other women, Toussine’s cabin is a place of practical and spiritual education where the initiate’s soul and conscience are nourished by other women. The intentional inattention to dates, despite the implicit presence of historical realities, gives the narrative an atemporal aspect characteristic of oral narratives. Finally, the narrator of The Bridge of Beyond speaks as if she had a physically present audience. (Larrier 2000: 59) The orality of African and Caribbean cultures is practiced by both men and women but not always in the same way and not always with the same effects on the way people understand and cope with life. As the gendered narrator of The Bridge of Beyond, Télumée interprets as a woman the

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speech of all members of the community (and even of people who look down on the community from the outside like the white owners of BelleFeuille), but in so doing she also analyses and questions the words of others on the basis of her knowledge and experience. Élie listens to the story of the man led by his horse and ultimately allows himself to be led by it. Télumée on the other hand benefits from the same story, following closely her grandmother Toussine’s advice to “keep good hold of the reins so that it’s not the horse that rides you.” (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 50-51).3 Larrier (2000: 62) recognizes as well the violent and destructive potential of the spoken word. She refers to the Désaragnes, the white family for whom Télumée is obliged to work. Madame Désaragne also practices an oral cultural tradition when she reminds Télumée of the place the young woman occupies in history: “ah, do you really know who you are, you Negroes here? You eat, you drink, you misbehave, and then you sleep and that’s it. But do you even know what you’ve escaped? You might be wild savages now, running through the bush, dancing naked and eating people stewed in pots.” (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 61)4

Schwarz-Bart represents as well an orality largely based on a community of male deliberation that carries the same self-destructive potential if left unchecked. For example, Télumée recalls a scene in which as a little girl, she hides in Old Abel’s bar and becomes a secret female witness to the power of orality in Abel’s patriarchal world: Once as I crouched under the counter, I saw a frail young man called Ti Paille suddenly get to his feet, his eyes bulging with rage, and shout: ‘No people deserves death, but I say the Negro deserves death for living as he does. Don’t you agree it’s death we deserve, brothers?’ There was a silence, then another man got up and said he was going kill Ti Paille just to teach him how to live. (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 33)5

Like a non-initiate secretly overhearing the liturgy of a secret society, she learns about the way the men of her community express and share the ongoing resentment and discouragement of a racially divided and inequitable universe. The man who threatens to kill Ti Paille in order to teach him how to live not only challenges the young man’s language of collective self-hatred, but uses the rhetorical devise known in French as “paradoxisme,” playing on the paradox that a person can learn to live better by being killed. As disturbing as Ti Paille’s words may be, they are immediately absorbed, in Télumée’s internal discourse, into the male orality of the times she is observing. As she grows in awareness of the

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potential destructiveness of the speech she hears moving around her, and later adds to that awareness the experience of the Désaragnes’ tradition of denigrating black people, Télumée builds a knowledge of her culture as a contradictory and momentous state of being. She will need the nuanced interpretive codes that women like Toussine and Ma Cia will provide for her to contextualize and understand everything that is happening to and around her. The problem of possible abuses of orality as the free circulation of the spoken word as consecrated by tradition gives us urgent cause to reflect further on the interpretation of this notion. According to Eileen Julien (1992: 25), two critical discourses have been up until now determining in the interpretation of orality in postcolonial literatures. According to her, the first discourse, the presence of signs of orality in an African novel, saves it from the acculturation implied by its use of a European language. The second discourse conceives of cultural and historical marginalization itself as source of creativity. Julien contends that both approaches imply the persistence of some essential African difference. To avoid this trap of essentialism, Julien emphasises the imprecision with which orality is generally defined or understood and the need to recognize the ludic and dynamic appropriations of various registers and modes of expression, so that no ancient tradition can mask the energy and constant change of daily life. The women represented in The Bridge of Beyond attempt through their conversation to explain, to share and to critique their collective understanding of the conditions in which they live from day to day. This effort is tied to the oral form of literary discourse in the sense that stories are repeated and reinvented in the context of conversation. But conversation is itself a means of reuniting disparate voices, and of putting in place and maintaining their social and political autonomy and influence. In conversation, women reconfigure the maps of meaning, authority and subversion as gossip, proverbial wisdom and irony give form to a language that is both collective and intimate. In her recent book Belonging, bell hooks evokes an experience she associates with African American women but which bears a striking resemblance to the experience of African and West Indian women as well: The porch as liminal space, standing between the house and the world of sidewalks and streets, was symbolically a threshold. Crossing it opened up the possibility of change. Women and children on the porch could begin to interpret the outside world on terms different from the received knowledge gleaned in the patriarchal household. (Hooks 2009: 146-7)

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The complexities, ambiguities and contradictions encountered in the struggle to represent in writing the spaces, conflicts and anxieties of mothers, fathers, children, men and women, results from the rejection of the “received knowledge gleaned from the patriarch’s household” (hooks 2009: 147). The present is enriched and made fruitful by past experiences. According to bell hooks, in the day “when people sat on their porch, usually on their swings, it was the way we all became acquainted with one another, the way we created community” (Hooks 2009: 147). Of course community cannot be created without oral communication, including shared food, ideas, interests, passions and stories, in whatever way these shared elements may be formally or informally embedded, or perhaps not even recognized at all, in what may be accepted as oral tradition. Brinda Mehta also highlights the historical associations of food, community and memory in her discussion of Gisèle Pineau’s culinary politics of exile and diaspora. For example, the consumption of certain foods such as rice and peas “affirms communal ties in the familiarity of habit.” (Mehta 2009: 99) When family life is threatened with centrifugal forces, “food represents a binding familial and communal force by providing a sense of wholeness and security to compensate for the anxiety provoked by [an] undetermined identity and insecure affiliations.” (Mehta 2009: 98) Oral discourse often expresses a traditional perspective on the place of women in society: “They thought of the old Toussine, in rags, and compared her with the Toussine of today - not a woman, for what is a woman? Nothing at all, they said, whereas Toussine was a bit of the world, a whole country, a plume of a Negress, the ship, sail and wind, for she had not made a habit of sorrow” (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 14).6 This example of orality implies a patriarchal conception of women, yet it is at the same time laced with an oral poetry of plenitude: a woman without political power takes a position on the symbolic ground of fullness. This ambivalence is not based solely on the presence of male voices in the orality represented. Though women practice forms of orality that do not always correspond to their own interests or aspirations, they can also engage in conversation where each shares her experiences and her opinions while benefitting from a common understanding and the evocation of the power to act. In a passage describing Télumée’s return to Fond-Zombi for a Sunday vacation from her work at Belle-Feuille, we are able to discern the relevance as well as the limits of the idea of orality as communal conversation mediated by culinary symbolism. Télumée refers to the white woman’s pride in her culture’s culinary superiority: nowhere outside of

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Belle-Feuille will you find a béchamel sauce. While the others express the desire to taste such a food, Toussine assures everyone present that there is nothing wonderful about béchamel and invites them to come anytime and “cook two slices of salted breadfruit over some wood in the yard here” (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 67).7 One woman named Adriana responds to both the challenge of the béchamel and the self-affirmation behind the salted breadfruit by claiming an abundance (especially of food) hidden in her cupboards, and that cannot be seen from the outside of her rags and ramshackle hut. Although her claim is supported by the fact that she has daughters living in Pointe-à-Pitre, one senses a suggestion of authorial irony in the remark that Toussine “backs her up firmly” (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 68). The food motif confers thematic continuity to this passage; it provides the form of Madame Desaragne’s destructive assessment of the people she sees as ungrateful and eternally inferior beings. Toussine responds by a laugh that goes beyond personal taste to imply a confident belief in the cultural and material integrity of her own existence. Then Adriana adds a more ambiguous and self-conscience dimension to what ultimately becomes an interpretive conversation built around the women of Fond-Zombi. She speaks to the hidden, unseen abundance of food and by extension of life that has been obscured by a mere appearance of material suffering. Adriana’s dream of abundance allows Télumée to observe the way in which the orality of her community works out its place both through strong belief in the collective self and complicated negotiations of the imaginary, the real and the uncertain. When Toussine introduces Télumée to her ostracised friend, Ma Cia, it is because of certain questions posed by Télumée herself. It was at Abel’s bar, the very centre of patriarchal orality, that Télumée has been listening to men’s conversations. According to Toussine, “Men take pleasure in winding their tongues around Ma Cia and tossing her about like the clothes we beat on the rocks to get the dirt out. It’s true people are afraid to talk about her, and that it’s dangerous to pronounce her name: But do they tell you what they do when they dislocate a bone, or have a muscle cramp, or can’t get their breath.” (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 34)8 What people say about Ma Cia evokes an oral tradition of African origins: healing, physical transformation, supernatural powers as well as spiritual and ecological insight. The idea of violently beating clothing on the rocks implies the way men tell stories about women in order to cope with their own fears and desires. Ma Cia is the reflection of the community that scorns, fears, and nevertheless exploits her. She is the ancient and persistent dream of a completeness that the community can no longer readily find within itself.

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The reason that Toussine puts Télumée in touch with Ma Cia at an early age is to reinforce the education in and through orality that she herself is providing and to counteract, by generating an alternative conversation, the orality of Abel’s bar. When Toussine takes Télumée for her first visit to Ma Cia, the three women start by taking a common meal, a symbolic rite of conversation. We see the spiritual dimension as the ancestral spirits share in the meal through the libation that Toussine pours for her departed husband. As the memorial function of this symbolic gathering of women calls up the memory of the founding violence of the community, the conversation with Ma Cia turns toward the memory of slavery. The peace and well-being of the community, at this hieratic moment, reminds Ma Cia of the lack of peace and well-being that surrounds them in time and continues to engulf them in a global human conversation on the “mémoires des esclavages” (Glissant). Ma Cia summarizes this remembrance with a fable: “‘Long ago’, she said, ‘a nest of ants that bite people peopled the earth, and called themselves men. That’s all.’” (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 38)9 One can hardly imagine a more succinct account of modern history. Télumée emerges from this encounter with a sharper consciousness of the material character of her culture. Ma Cia has taken up the oral discourse that others used to dismiss her subversive existence and she is now using it herself to bring her own judgment to bear on the world system that put her where she is. Later, at Toussine’s wake, several women are brought together in dialogue with Ma Cia. A conversation is initiated by a very old woman named Ismène when, referring to Toussine’s hard life, she asks: “To see so much misery, be spat at so often, become hopeless and die – is life on earth really right for man?” (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 123)10 When Ma Cia responds by comparing her friend to a rainbow that leaves its mark on the heavens, another mourner cynically remarks that a rainbow is short lived and that God ultimately “kills” every living creature. This leads Ma Cia to insist on the philosophy underlying her (and their) belief system since God “can’t prevent a Negro showing Him the weight he accords to another Negro” (Schwarz-Bart 1982: 123-4). Man’s belonging more to heaven than to earth is interpreted by the fellow mourners as an allusion to Ma Cia’s alleged sorcery. Ma Cia demands of her fellow women (there are men present but they are not major contributors to the discussion) that Toussine’s life be celebrated, but since Toussine did not know anything like prosperity, success or political influence (other than the brief moment of joy before her first twin daughter’s accidental death), that celebration has to be based on a spiritual premise of human “flight”: that spirits rise towards the heavens because they affirm the dignity of their people. The

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other mourners show resistance to Ma Cia’s account of the Black person’s claim to dignity because their lives have not been what they would have wanted them to be. Orality is not always a triumphant hymn nor is it necessarily a commemoration of inevitable loss: it is a conversation that works around collective and individual loss and triumph as its participants negotiate with each other. The role of orality is no less important in Le livre d’Emma (The Book of Emma). What is perhaps new is the manner in which the relationship between Emma’s claim to collective memory and “Emma’s book” (to which that collective memory seems to lead) is negotiated and discussed. Though the trauma of the slave trade, for example, continuously comes to the surface in the women’s dialogue and oral memory of The Bridge of Beyond, trauma as the central problem of orality itself raises new questions regarding the interpretation of and by Le livre d’Emma. Emma implicitly explains (in her own language) why she refuses to speak French with Doctor MacLeod through a proverb: “When animals howl in pain, they never borrow the voice of others.” (Agnant 2004: 16)11 The problem of orality in Le livre d’Emma is the problem of how to describe the resistant voice of black women living in the world. According to Brinda Mehta, it is possible to see in the writing of West Indian women an old diasporic wound that has brought about a creative and dynamic practice of identity, along with new forms of physical, intellectual, cultural and spiritual resistance (Mehta 2009: 2). Traumatism may thus be an appropriate point of entry into the interpretation of Agnant’s text where the main character’s oral witness is related to the rejection of her own written historical account of the trauma of the slave trade. Mehta criticizes male critics for having paid little attention to what she calls “the gendering of diaspora” as they try to show the intersections of class, ethnicity, departmentalisation, the state and violence (Mehta 2009: 3). The historical trauma that Agnant refers to is not only based on the fact that the Transatlantic Slave trade took place, but also that the traces of that event continue to determine the relationship of Haitian women with official history and with the rest of the world. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that France, the country responsible for the practice of plantation slavery in its colony of Saint Domingue, has always been somewhat reticent in recognizing its responsibility in regards to this system that made France one of the wealthiest slave-trading and slaveowning nations of the world. It is only on May 10, 2001 that the Taubira law of the French National Assembly will recognize slavery as a crime against humanity. Only under enormous public pressure was then President Chirac pushed to agree to efforts aimed at integrating instruction

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on French colonial history into the national curriculum. On the other hand, Haitians themselves have had the tendency to centre the history of national liberation on three men: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Henri Christophe and Dessalines. The constant threat of forgetfulness, not only of a vast historical trauma but of its gendered character leads Mehta to ask how maternal genealogies like that of Emma emerge from the prison of death, violence and intentional, systematic forgetting (Mehta 2009: 11). Trauma is not limited to violence itself, but builds on the long-term effect of the memory of violence among both the victims and their descendants, and even among the agents of violence who continue to suppress the voice of those victims in order feel justified and at ease in the world. Cathy Caruth explains that traumatized persons carry within themselves an impossible history, through which they become the symptom of a history that cannot fully belong to them (see Caruth 1996: 8-9). Emma is a traumatized victim who ceases to be a victim to the extent that she must reclaim that ownership of her past. As Maria Adamowicz-Hariasz points out in reference to Agnant’s representation of trauma: “bearing witness allows the survivors of a trauma to reclaim the position of the agent who regains ownership of her life. By telling her story Emma becomes “the subject and not the object of the story/of history” (Adamowicz-Hariasz 2010: 162).12 When certain African midwives systematically killed black babies to prevent them from becoming and producing slaves, Mehta asks: “Is infanticide considered an act of criminality in the eyes of the colonial court precisely because it represents an act of autonomy by an enslaved woman who makes her own decisions?” (Mehta 2009: 33). Emma’s infanticide seems to reflect an intentional repetition of an ancestral memory. But her response to trauma does not reside in the fact that she may have killed her child but in her refusal to explain to the psychiatrist who represents authority and patriarchy why she killed her child. She refuses to be classified, analyzed and determined by violence. Her act belongs to her and to her sisters, to all who speak her language and to all those she remembers. As Emma begins to relate to Flore, the Haitian interpreter employed by the psychiatrist Doctor MacLeod, she explains: It was when I was about to turn four, I believe, that I began to repeat my dreams, so as to not forget them. If you want to repeat a dream, you simply close your eyes and retrace, in the opposite direction, the path of the dream. There you have the words of the real Negresses, you know, the ones who never had more than their dreams as their possessions. When our people arrived on the plantation, their names were stripped away, so were their bodies and their existence - don’t look at me that way, Baby Doll,

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that’s the truth pure and simple that I’m telling you. And for centuries, others have used, abused, sold, bought, killed, rejected, ignored those beings that we are, so what do you want me to say? Do what you like, it’s only your dreams that belong to you. (Agnant 2004: 66)13

Witnesses like Flore and Doctor MacLeod are called by Emma’s words to open their eyes. The little doctor does not want to see the dream of the women he wants to analyze. Emma is calling on Flore to replace the gaze of the doctor who hired her to act as his intermediary (“interprète”), to become the Negress standing up who dreams (just as Télumée tells us she dreams standing in her garden at the end of her life), but who, in so doing, retraces in the opposite direction the path of collective trauma of all the descendants of the slave trade. This call underlines the importance of the song that Emma repeatedly sings: “Kilima changu kidogo” (Agnant 2004: 22 and passim). The song evokes Emma’s first woman ancestor and the mountains of Africa. It is a form of orality that evokes the geo-historical trajectory keeping Emma alive and that invites Flore to begin to understand what it really means to be an interpreter of that trajectory. Winfried Siemerling notes that Agnant sees oral transmission as an historically necessary role, but one to which women have been relegated due to their limited access to public space, writing and literary publication. Writing then becomes the means of struggling for the greater inclusion of African and Caribbean women and of introducing their work of orality into the public forum of writing. The narrative form that concretizes the importation of orality “speaks directly to specific conditions of women’s access to writing and publication.” (Siemerling 2007: 846) If this interpretation seems to fall into the tendency criticized by Julien of seeing orality as a stage that came before the emergence of writing, Siemerling defends such an emergent form of writing by calling it “functionally reenergized” (Siemerling 2007: 847) in the context of unequal access to the public space of writing that has historically been afforded to diasporic writing, and diasporic voices in general. Whereas Emma, who is telling the story of her ancestors, sees in this story, according to Siemerling, “a deterministic script that circulates with the blood in the body, a reading that leaves no room for the kind of choice presumed by ethics” (Siemerling 2007: 853), Flore, the translatorinterpreter, though she may feel challenged by Emma for collaborating with the white psychiatrist Doctor MacLeod, does ultimately find the right interpretation of Emma’s oral witness: “Instead of an immutable fate, the narrator [Flore] reads in Emma’s story the possibilities of human decision and valuation that are the mark of the ethical subject.” (Siemerling 2007: 854) Thus it is actually Flore, according to Siemerling’s interpretation,

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who will be qualified to give the right interpretation to the story and life of Emma. Emma’s book however is not the one that will be written by Flore and then published as Emma’s book. The published book will allow us to get a glimpse of Emma’s speech, whether in the form of the oral discourse that Emma refuses to pronounce in French for Doctor MacLead, or of the thesis that was rejected by the academic authorities of Bordeaux. Saying “Emma’s book” is a way of naming the book that cannot be written, at least not in the nightmarish world of the Montreal psychiatric ward where the memory of the wound that Emma carries in herself can neither be said nor heard. Agnant is no doubt wrong to insist so much on the word “curse” in speaking of the transhistoric condition of Haitian women, as if that condition was the result of a divine act and not of a “nest of ants that bite” and that “called themselves men” (Schwarz-Bart), that is, of the Transatlantic slave trade, a conscious and intentional crime against humanity. But neither the translation into French by Flore nor the writing in French of her own observations will be sufficient to guide us in correcting that error. The book of Emma that we have access to is a collection of intertwined perspectives that interpret the orality of African and Caribbean women in their ambiguity and in the force of their claim to transhistoric character and meaning. When Emma, traumatized by the way her mother Fifie has rejected her, takes refuge with Mattie the elderly cousin of her grandmother Rosa, Mattie uses a similar language of “curse” to console her. Mattie wants Emma to understand that Fifie, even in the midst of the racial pathology that has turned her into more a monster than a mother, “had been caught up in the same turning wheel.” She presents the atavistic nature of misfortune as a bodily memory: “The sickness your mother is suffering from comes from a long way back. It flows in our veins, we ingest it with the first sip of our mothers’ milk” (Agnant 2004: 121).14 But what Mattie is implanting in Emma’s mind, and what Emma in turn decides to bequeath to Flore, is a transhistorical framework founded in orality that is much broader than misfortune itself, though the understanding of misfortune remains a vital part of that legacy. First of all, Mattie, without knowing how to read or write herself, encourages Emma to advance in the acquisition of writing skills precisely because living with Mattie was “like living in a vast book that she constructed day by day and in which I discovered the arabesques and meanderings of the souls of human beings” (Agnant 2004: 122).15 The oral narrative practice of Mattie and the legacy that Emma decides to offer to Flore represent a broadening of the concept of the book. Emma’s book is a

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book that speaks and a speaking that asks to be read: the more Emma listens to Mattie the more she desires to read because reading is already implicit in the act of listening. Secondly the initial admission of atavism in the book of Mattie’s speech is in the end revealed to be more a vestibule of conscience, destined to prepare Emma’s mind to receive and understand a counteratavistic discourse. Mattie insists on the fact that “memory is sometimes a gust of wind, undertow, sand that swallows us. But it is also the branch we cling to when the tides are too strong” (Agnant 2004: 133).16 The memory that Mattie is trying to transmit carries the trace of a traumatizing historical misfortune but allows us at the same time to remain intact. Mattie refuses those dreams of Emma that end in total destruction, but offers instead tales “in which the women warriors always got back up, and borrowed, in order to walk, the feet and legs of those who were being born.” (Agnant 2004: 137)17 Against the atavism of the historical misfortune, Mattie offers a vision of the body that reconfigures itself from one generation to the next. This interpretation of oral memory is confirmed by the dreamt or mythic meeting first reported to Mattie by Emma’s grandmother Rosa: the latter’s mother-in-law Béa, the eternal maroon Cécile, and Kilima, the first of the lineage, form a circle around her, at the moment of her defeat at the hands of the inexplicable, ironic and fatal “lactification” of her children and the resulting defection of her husband. These women who surround her invite her to start to make her way back to Guinea. What matters most in this dream of return to Africa, as it is transmitted from Rosa to Mattie, from Mattie to Emma and from Emma to Flore, is not some kind of redemption of the woman of African origin, because Emma is not stopped in her destructive course of action for which medical science can only offer banal, predictable and stereotypical explanations. Rather we are witnessing a moment when a woman of African origin stands up in the presence of another: “[Rosa] had put death under her mattress, telling it to wait till she finished her sparkling white dress to start her journey, to wait till she taught me everything about her life, so that I could pass it on myself.” (Agnant 2004: 139)18 Based on a reflection that can be found with considerable continuity between Simone Schwarz-Bart and Marie-Célie Agnant, orality implies a communicative need which does not stand in stark opposition to the written word. Writing is an implicit form of that orality that constitutes and completes it. Writers like Schwarz-Bart and Agnant are not simply spreading out before the modern, literate reader (like the Flore who was hired by Dr. MacLeod) a folkloric tradition that might in the best-case scenario be viewed as subversive. They actually force any interpreter who

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might come along to remember the composite and trans-temporal voice of an objectively traumatized memory, with its stubborn claim to the right to accuse. It is true that this memory cannot forget its own misfortune, but each time it finds a listener who may belong to it, it defers once again the moment of drowning, all the while discretely pointing out the way to the sea.

Notes 1

« Les mots proviennent, non pas de mon cerveau pour aboutir à mes lèvres, mais de mon ventre. Je ne suis plus une simple interprète. Petit à petit, j’abandonne mon rôle, je deviens une partie d’Emma, j’épouse le destin d’Emma. » (English version is my translation.) 2 « Si on m’en donnait le pouvoir, c’est ici même, en Guadeloupe, que je choisirais de renaître, souffrir et mourir. Pourtant, il n’y a guère, mes ancêtres furent esclaves en cette île à volcans, à cyclones et moustiques, à mauvaise mentalité. Mais je ne suis pas venue sur terre pour soupeser toute la tristesse du monde. A cela, je préfère rêver, encore et encore, debout au milieu de mon jardin, comme le font toutes les vieilles de mon âge, jusqu’à ce que la mort me prenne dans mon rêve, avec toute ma joie… » (Schwarz-Bart 1972: 11) 3 « Si tu enfourches un cheval, garde ses brides bien en main, afin qu’il ne te conduise pas. » (Schwarz-Bart 1972: 82) 4 « …ah, savez-vous au juste qui vous êtes, vous les nègres d’ici ?... vous mangez, vous buvez, vous faites les mauvais, et puis vous dormez… un point c’est tout. Mais savez-vous seulement à quoi vous avez échappé ? … sauvages et barbares que vous seriez en ce moment, à courir dans la brousse, à danser nus et à déguster les individus en potée… » (Schwarz-Bart 1972: 96-7) 5 « Une fois, accroupie sous le comptoir, je vis un frêle jeune homme du nom de Ti Paille se dresser subitement, les yeux exorbités de fureur, criant… aucune nation ne mérite la mort, mais je dis que le nègre mérite la mort pour vivre comme il vit… et n’est-ce pas la mort que nous méritons, mes frères ?... Il y eut un silence, puis un homme se leva et dit qu’il allait donner la mort à Ti Paille sur-le-champ, rien que pour lui apprendre à vivre. » (Schwarz-Bart 1972: 56). 6 « Ils songeaient à la Toussine d’autrefois, celle en haillons, et puis la comparaient avec celle d’aujourd’hui qui n’était pas une femme, car qu’est-ce qu’une femme ?...un néant, disaient-ils, tandis que Toussine était tout au contraire un morceau de monde, un pays tout entier, un panache de négresse, la barque, la voile et le vent, car elle ne s’était pas habituée au malheur. » (Schwarz-Bart 1972: 29). 7 « Tu n’as qu’à faire cuire deux tranches de fruit à pain au gros sel, sur du bois, au fond de la cour. » (Schwarz-Bart 1972: 104-5) 8 « Le plaisir des hommes c’est de prendre man Cia sous leur langue et de la faire voltiger à la façon du linge qu’on lance sur les roches de la rivière pour en faire tomber la crasse. C’est vrai que les gens en parlent avec crainte, car il y a toujours un risque à prononcer ce nom : man Cia. Mais te disent-ils ce qu’ils font lorsque

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leurs os se déplacent, lorsque leurs muscles se nouent, lorsqu’ils n’arrivent plus à reprendre le souffle dans la vie ? » (Schwarz-Bart 1972 : 58) 9 « Autrefois, dit-elle, un nid de fourmis mordantes avait peuplé la terre et voilà, elles s’étaient elles-mêmes appelées hommes… pas plus que ça… » (Schwarz-Bart 1972: 63) 10 « voir tant de misères, recevoir tant de crachats, devenir impotent et mourir… la vie sur terre convient-elle donc vraiment à l’homme ? » (Schwarz-Bart 1972: 184) 11 « les bêtes qui hurlent n’empruntent jamais la voix des autres. » 12 « déposer un témoignage permet aux survivants d’un trauma de reprendre la position d’agent qui rentre en possession de sa vie. En contant son histoire, Emma devient sujet plutôt qu’objet de l’histoire ». 13 « C’est l’année de mes quatre ans, je crois, que j’ai commencé à répéter mes rêves, pour ne pas les oublier. Pour répéter un rêve, on n’a qu’à fermer les yeux et refaire, en sens inverse, le chemin du rêve. Ça, ce sont des paroles de vraies Négresses, tu sais de celles qui n’ont jamais eu pour tout bien que leurs rêves. À l’arrivée des nôtres sur les plantations, on les dépouillait de leur nom, de leur corps, de leur existence - ne fais pas cette tête, Poupette, c’est la vérité pure ce que je te dis. Et pendant des siècles, d’autres ont usé, abusé, vendu, acheté, tué, rejeté, ignoré ces êtres que nous sommes, alors que veux-tu ? Tu as beau faire, tes rêves seuls t’appartiennent. » 14 « Le mal dont souffre ta mère vient de loin. Il coule dans nos veines, nous l’ingurgitons dès la première gorgée du lait maternelle. » 15 « c’était comme vivre dans un grand livre, un livre qu’elle construisait chaque jour, page après page, et dans lequel je découvrais les arabesques et les méandres de l’âme des humains. » 16 « La mémoire est parfois bourrasque, ressac, sable qui nous engloutit. Mais elle est aussi cette branche à laquelle s’accrocher quand les marées sont trop fortes. » 17 « dans lesquels les guerrières se relevaient toujours et empruntaient, pour marcher, les pieds et les jambes de celles qui naissaient. » 18 « Elle avait mis la mort sous son matelas en lui disant d’attendre qu’elle ait terminé son vêtement blanc étincelant pour prendre la route, d’attendre qu’elle m’ait tout appris de sa vie, afin que je le transmette à mon tour. »

References Adamowicz-Hariasz, Maria. “Le Trauma et le témoignage dans Le livre d’Emma de Marie-Célie Agnant. Symposium 64.3 (2010) : 149-68. Agnant, Marie-Célie. Le livre d’Emma. La Roque d’Anthéron: Vent d’ailleurs, 2004. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Glissant, Édouard. Mémoires des esclavages. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Hooks, Bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009.

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Julien, Eileen. African Novels and the Question of Orality. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Larrier, Renée. Francophone women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Mehta, Brinda. Notions of Identity, Diaspora and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009. Schwarz-Bart, Simone. Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. —. The Bridge of Beyond. B. Bray, trans. Oxford: Heinemann, l982. Siemerling, Winfried. “Ethics as Re/Cognition in the Novels of MarieCélie Agnant: Oral Knowledge, Cognitive Change, and Social Justice.” University of Toronto Quarterly 76.3 (2007): 838-60.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN CARIBBEAN WOMEN’S NOVELS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF POSTCOLONIAL IMMIGRANT IDENTITY LUC FOTSING FONDJO UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Contemporary francophone literature has come to be characterized by the narrative hypertrophy of identity.1 In this context, one of the commonplaces of Caribbean women’s fiction is no doubt the focus on the condition of the postcolonial immigrant in today’s world. That focus would seem to be the priority of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé and Marie-Célie Agnant, especially when one considers the trajectories of the main characters of their respective novels Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, Desirada and Le livre d’Emma. The quest for identity illustrated by these trajectories is certainly not new, but the identity of the immigrant subjects that these authors represent is constructed on the basis of a rupture that becomes all the more significant for being a profanation in the sense of a rupture between a mother and her children. In other words, beyond the factor of mobility, profanation appears as one of the nerve centres of the narratives as well as one of the determining factors in the construction of postcolonial immigrant identity. I will examine this rupture from both a diachronique perspective (by considering the relationship between the author and certain literary and cultural traditions) and a synchronic perspective that is, at the level of the characters, represented. At this second level, recurring problematic patterns such as exile without and within, exclusion, alienation and sometimes madness are associated with solitary and hybrid feminine subjects. Meanwhile the marginalized spaces that the central characters occupy may open up to the potential for creativity, invention or reinvention and self-construction.

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Readers of African and Caribbean literatures have become accustomed to the mothers or grandmothers enjoying a privileged status as authority figures apt and even zealous to ensure the subject’s coherence and psychological education. The voice of the mother or grandmother, often determining, and to be called upon in times of distress, guides the steps of the descendent mentally and emotionally to ensure the unity and balance that would otherwise have been missing. As a result, the natural and classical ties between the child and its mother or grandmother entered the realm of the sacred. One of the parameters that hold our corpus together is precisely the nature of the central problem of these narratives: the profanation of the longstanding link between the subject and the maternal members of previous generations. Referring the Condé’s Desirada, Lydie Moudileno speaks of a movement that « turns the course of the classic identity quest towards a subjectivity that affirms itself both as an insular space and as one that is situated outside of what Maximin calls the “mother’s domain.” (Moudileno 2003: 1152) We will discover that this detour from the classic trajectory—a detour that Moudileno calls “insolence”—constitutes a profanatory acts. The latter is a narrative problem which in Condé’s fiction takes up a new tradition already identifiable in Schwarz-Bart’s writing and still discernible in the work of Agnant. Thus the affront by the female subject to her ties with her mother and or grandmother constitutes a recurring narrative motif for all three of these authors who, breaking with more traditional schemata, propose a major departure from the usual course of events.

Profanation of the Un-profanable The three-part structure of Desirada represents three generations whose visibility depends on three feminine figures: Marie-Noël of the young generation, her grandmother Nina of the old generation, with Marie-Noël’s mother (and Nina’s daughter) Reynalda representing the intermediate generation. Among these three generations, all of them characterized by the scrambling of the traces of the paternal, the narrative schema is designed to invite the reader to track Marie-Noël’s quest for identity. Yet the way in which these three generations are represented already reflects the profanatory intention of the narrative. For example, the non-chronological representation of the three generations subverts any semblance of narrative coherence and suggests the deconstruction of all certainty as to the relational coherence of the subject and previous generations. Thus, in the identity quest initiated by the heroin Marie-

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Noëlle, her mother and grandmother, who might be expected by the reader to act as adjuvants, fail to fulfil those expectations. Not only do they cover over the evidence the heroin needs in her search with lies, they even reject their own offspring. According to some logic of association and even of identification, the very sight of Marie-Noëlle brings back to her mother Reynalda memories of a rape that she would have preferred to permanently forget (Condé 1997: 277), hence the rupture between the mother and the daughter. Deprived of her mother’s help, the heroin, from her exile in Boston undertakes a “retour au pays natal,” a return journey to her native Guadeloupe, to meet the grandmother whose support in the quest for identity is crucial. Contrary to all the reader’s expectations, she will hear her grandmother say to her: “If I have an advice to give you, it’s to forget all that [the search for her origins] and go back to wherever you came out from. America? There is no place for you here” (Condé 1997: 202). The relations that the grandmother establishes with her granddaughter MarieNoëlle correspond to the network of paradoxical relations that Giorgio Agamben calls “relations of exception,” which he defines as “that extreme form of relation that only includes something by virtue of its exclusion” (Agamben 1995: 26). In that sense, the nature of the discourse with which the grandmother responds to Marie-Noëlle is only possible on the basis of the filial links between the two characters. That filiation appears in the naked light of its transgression or profanation through the rejection of the granddaughter by the grandmother. In what seems like a symmetrical effect, in the novels of Schwarz-Bart and Agnant considered in this study, the rupture of the ties between the daughter and her maternal predecessors is not brought about by the mother or the grandmother, but rather by the daughter. According to Mariotte, the heroin of Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, the permanent and powerful link that her grand-mother maintains through visions constitutes an obstacle to the construction of her identity. She thus declares: “[I] understood that grandmother would never cease to crush me under the weight of her prophesies, even if I were to go on taking it patiently for a thousand years” (Schwarz-Bart 1967: 46). The speech of the grandmother, as put in writing by Schwarz-Bart, is desacralized. It becomes a crushing, smothering speech and an obstacle to the freedom of the postcolonial emigrant. As a result, the heroin, in her construction of her identity, severs this tie which has now become a source of oppression. Finally, the distance between the two generations has now become extensive enough to prevent there being any influence of one on the other. The younger generation has emancipated itself so to speak from the older. Then narrative inscription of this distance is also reflected in the manner in

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which these two protagonists refer to each other: whereas the grandmother calls the granddaughter “Madame,” Mariotte uses the term “old Negress,” with all its pejorative charge, to designate the grandmother (Schwarz-Bart 1967: 44; 45). « Madame » is in fact the term that the grandmother would use to address her white mistress, while the latter would be expected to use the term “old Negress” to designate an elderly slave. The imaginary element here is that of the haunting of slavery and its dramatic effects on intergenerational relationships. The reuse of slave vocabulary by the two characters is connected to the psychological interpretation of the two women joined by the filial relationship. The grandmother has remained fixed in the slave’s mentality, interiorizing and making her own various racial clichés. Formed in the culture of slavery, she has integrated certain particular traits. The fact for her being incapable of living otherwise than in submission to the white masters, and of believing it to be reasonable to transmit that same culture to her descendants justifies the use of the term “old negress” by Mariotte. “Old” alludes not only to the age of the grandmother, but also to the test of time that has not succeeded in eroding in her the psychology of the slave. On the other hand, from the point of view of the grandmother, Mariotte’s rebellion and her tenacious resistance to the heritage of submission that Man Louise is trying to transmit make her granddaughter a stranger, that is an agent of a culture that is different from that of the grandmother, an agent that she ironically designates as “Madame” to accuse her of pretending to be above her station as a descendant of slaves, drawing this term from the cultural register that she knows. In addition, there is between Mariotte and her grandmother an almost insurmountable wall of incomprehension that translates the incompatibility of their visions of the world and thus their irreconcilability. In the same way, the self-construction of identity undertaken by Emma, the heroin of Marie-Célie Agnant’s Livre d’Emma, is taken up through a work of memory the product of which is written down in notebooks. This process implies the disqualification of the mother’s authority. Emma says to Flore, her principal listener: Fifie was the same type as you, a Negress with that inside out skin and all that misassembled paraphernalia. You’ll see, when you learn the story of Fifie, my mother, you’ll see, there’s no point in fighting against one’s Negress skin, you might as well change the color of the ocean (Agnant 2004: 26-27).

In the wake of the literature of rupture, as we have observed it with Schwarz-Bart and Condé, Agnant suggests through her writing the

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profanation of the “un-profanable.” Thus, the mother, contrary to traditional discourse, is presented “in a morally detestable light” (Moudileno 2003: 1155), with the traits of a pariah who simply must be done away with. This rejection of the mother by the daughter is a symmetrical effect of the rejection of the daughter by the mother, an event which can be traced back to early childhood, according to the picture painted by the autodiegetic heroin: Some days earlier, the sea had risen to reach the city and had even invaded people’s homes. People had had to take refuge, some on rooftops, some in trees. Aunt Grazie and Mama had done like the others [...]. When after three days Aunt Grazie and Fifie returned they seemed so annoyed to find me there, in the flesh, such distress showed on their faces and in their smallest gestures that I decided I would do well to go away. (Agnant 2001: 91)

Against tradition, Marie-Célie Agnant’s transgressive writing bends the trajectory of both the mother and the daughter toward a “grey zone”2 (Agamben 1999: 18) where former allies become each other’s executioner. Agnant in this way places the postcolonial immigrant on a moving threshold where the subject’s filial relation loses it balance. As a result, the subject is projected in a state of psychological and social isolation out of which she is left to negotiate on her own what will become her identity. With Schwarz-Bart, Condé and Agnant, profanation brings to light a new type of parodic relationship (Agamben 2005: 43) between the immigrant and her maternal predecessors as it appertains to the search of identity. The parodic nature of the narratives that result is justified by the fact that these narratives are decentred, that is to say “thrown off” or “sidelined” (see Agamben 2005: 44) from the point of view of traditional conventions. In this sense, the ostracism of the immigrant by her mother or grandmother, or symmetrically, the ostracism of the mother or grandmother by the immigrant, constitutes a derogation of the right and authority of the maternal “ancestor” to order the identity forming universe of her progeny. The ostracism of the mother figure, that is her destitution or exclusion, signifies at the same time the exclusion of the postcolonial emigrant and her being assigned to a “hors-monde” (Mbembe 2000 : 218) from out of which she develops an aptitude for self-determination and selfinvestigation in a new universe of identity (identities). Therefore, when associated with identity, the profanatory act as it affects the classic tie between the subject and her mothers and grandmothers is at the heart of the narrative process of the three novels considered in this study. But what would the point of disjunction of this

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filiation be? To put it another way, it now becomes necessary to work towards a hermeneutics of this profanatory act: what exactly are the measures put in place, in Caribbean women’s fiction, to structure the severing of a sacred filial or identity forming tie? What is suggested for these authors by the impossible connection of the postcolonial emigrant subject to her national, familial and especially maternal roots?

Identity and Primacy of the Liberty of the Subject The literary discourse of Schwarz-Bart, Condé and Agnant and the intellectual positions they have taken cannot be separated from the geographic context in which they are inscribed. That context is marked by the development of a predominantly masculine theoretical discourse that leads to the kind of identity forming choice that Marie-Denise Shelton describes: Today, in the French-speaking Caribbean, in the domain of theory, a choice is presented among three terms: africanité, créolité, and antillanité. As with any option which presents itself in exclusive forms, this choice is embedded in the complex antagonisms of contemporary Caribbean politics (Shelton 1993: 717).

The Caribbean context, a geographic universe of diversity and cultural change fuelled by the phenomenon of globalization, excludes the identities that we have seen suggested. Rigid and frozen, these identities tend to become “murderous identities” (Amin Maalouf 1998) to which our authors would hardly subscribe. The approach taken in the three texts studied thus consists of deconstructing the homogeneity of literary, contextual, or conceptual identity suggested by such concepts as antillanité, africanité and créolité as developed through hegemonic male discourse in the West Indies. That is why the novels studied here oppose a contradictory discourse to the authoritarian tyranny of men. Maryse Condé states for example: What I can say is that I am trying to produce a literature that escapes from all forms of rigidity, all canons, all interdictions, all official lines, and that would correspond to what I, Maryse Condé am in the face of all the problems of the world that surrounds us. (Marie-Agnès Sourieau and Maryse Condé 1999 : 1095)

The position taken by these writers goes against the flow of official discourses that are deployed in many texts, particularly in the

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representation of the role of the masculine figure in the process of the immigrant’s identity formation. In Desirada for example, the rape that was apparently inflicted by Gian Carlo Coppini on Reynalda figures as the source of lies, secrets and the resulting disturbance and rupture of family ties. No masculine figure in Condé’s novel is painted in a positive light. Not to mention Gian Carlo Coppini, Stanley and Terri are presented as sexual predators. Even Ludovic3 who seemed different in Marie-Noëlle’s eyes confesses his hypocrisy to the heroin toward the end of the novel: And even me, you thought I was above reproach, but who knows how many pairs of crying eyes and children without a father I’ve left in the places I passed through? Whether in Africa, in America or in France, I’ve always adored the body of women and taken my share of pleasure with them. (Condé 1997: 270)

The masculine figure in the novels appears as a metonymy of the colonizer and the béké, that is the image of the one who dominates, crushes, pours out scorn and causes the misfortune of the black woman in particular. Ultimately the black woman is doubly subaltern, first in relation to the colonizer and then to the black man who has failed to fulfil his responsibilities as well. This double subalternity is described by Céline (Emma’s maroon ancestor) in Le livre d’Emma: And the men who made the journey with us cannot even protect us any longer. What violent poison were they given to drink? Isn’t it obvious that for them we too have become a prey, only good enough to receive their bit that they chase us with in fields during the day and in the shadows of the cabins at night! They told them, in order to keep them in chains that they were nothing but animals, and in the end they believed them. (Agnant 2001: 159)

Celine in her discourse identifies the black men with the békés. Furthermore, she scorns the black men as much as the békés. Céline’s words re-establish the level of alienation of the Nègre who, from listening to the stereotypes attached to his condition, from having it hammered into his head—often by the slave-owner accompanied by the language of the whip—gives in to the conviction of the veracity of these insults and stereotypes. The direct consequence of the black man’s resignation, that leads him to fall in line with the colonizer’s diktat, is his turning on his sister of the same race and his new and unhappy double status as both victim and intermediary agent of the barbarity of the slave trade and of colonialism.

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This does not mean however that the women writers of our corpus are attempting to deify the figure of the feminine: far from it. Condé for example declares: “Neither do I believe in the virtues of the Caribbean woman who would be between the heavens and the earth, who would be the pillars of societies. I think I showed in Desirada that the woman can be the victim of all kinds of traumas” (Marie-Agnès Sourieau and Maryse Condé 1999: 1097). What one observes on the part of these writers is rather a dismantling, an unveiling and an exposing of everything that could indoctrinate the contemporary Caribbean immigrant, including the mother figure protected by tradition. When Fifie, Emma’s mother in Agnant’s novel, rejects her daughter, it is because she is subject to a traumatic neurosis that pushes her to seek after whiteness. Her rejection of her daughter constitutes in this sense an inappropriate sublimation of her racial inferiority complex—a consequence of a violent relationship with the colonizers as represented by Doctor MacLeod and the “colons de Bordeaux” (Agnant 2001: 15—into a feeling of superiority towards her daughter whose skin happens to be darker than her own. Marie-Célie Agnant’s fiction thus does not attack the dominant in their cruelty alone, but also the dominated, including the maternal figure, sometimes stripped of its sacredness. Agnant criticizes those who have interiorized the racist discourse of the colonizer to the point of getting used to it and accepting it. In their representation of the maternal figure, Schwarz-Bart, like Condé and Agnant, focuses on the profanation of the “un-profanable.” In fact, Mariotte’s grandmother in Un plat de porc… is also a neurotic person with a tendency to suffer from a racial inferiority complex. For that reason the grandmother’s alienation disqualifies her from her pillar-like status in the structuring of the granddaughter’s identity. Mariotte discovers so to speak in the alienated discourse of her grandmother the both retrograde and suicidal character of the identity heritage that was transmitted to her orally. The grandmother says: “By the accursed blood! …How many times did I warn you: stay in your place of a Negress, my girl, don’t move an inch; otherwise the white world will crush you like an ordinary lizard” (Schwarz-Bart 1967: 44). The reference to “blood” in the definition of the “negress” in the discourse of the grandmother implies that for her identity is ontological and consubstantial, that is, fixed and immutable. For Mariotte the intolerable character of such an internalization of racist stereotypes on her grandmother’s part obscures the schema of the quest for

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identity landmarks and inaugurates in her mind a new type of consideration of the filial relation with her grandmother. In addition, given the resemblance of mother-daughter relations in the texts studied, one could imagine an intertexual dialogue in which Emma assumed the voice of Mariotte to respond to her grandmother: “What do you think? Since they left the cane fields, the Negresses have learned to reflect” (Agnant 2004: 32). In their identity quest, the heroines of our novels resist all essentialist mentality that would reduce the descendants of slaves or colonized people to a static identity. Such a conception of the identity of the descendants of slaves and colonized people would not acknowledge them to be able to define, represent and construct themselves. It would make of them eternal subordinates. Thus, whoever might want to disassociate themselves from such a definition would stress its pathology, more exactly its folly and would themselves become a threat to society, subject to them being isolated, as in the case of Mariotte and Emma, both accused of insanity. Their speech has become dangerous and is subject to systematic control. The racial alienation of the maternal figure therefore appears as the profanatory gesture that deactivates the harmonious arrangement of the ties of identity between the subject and her mothers and grandmothers. The character of Aunt Mattie, in Le livre d’Emma becomes Emma’s spiritual mother and guide. She is in this sense the residue of the sacred in their profaned ties. But it is profanation itself that will be the literary motif at the root of a new representation of identity in the Caribbean novel by women. This motif will provide the theoretical framework for the deconstruction of a classic model which, according to Moudileno (2003: 1152) was thought to be indispensable to the formulation of the postcolonial immigrant’s identity. Profanation thus becomes the point of departure to the opening up of the plurality of discourses in the construction of the postcolonial immigrant subject’s space of identity formation. The severing of this classic filial tie could thus be the parameter that will free the postcolonial immigrant from determinisms and propels him or her toward an autonomous formation of identity more appropriate to the relations between the Caribbean and the contemporary world. The sacrifice of the sacred tie with the maternal predecessor makes of the postcolonial immigrant a unique subject. She is doubly exiled, within her community as in a foreign country. Moreover, she is excluded and separated in the religious sense that Giogrio Agamben explains in the following terms: “One can define religion as that which removes things, places, animals or persons from commune usage and transfers them into a

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separate sphere” (Agamben 2005: 96). Mariotte, Marie-Noëlle and Emma are solitary immigrants, as much separated from family ties as from their motherlands. Agamben adds regarding the religious nature of separation that “not only is there no religion without separation, but all separation contains or conserves in and of itself an authentically religious core” (Idem). The separation that the protagonists undergo in these novels is connected to the relationship of these postcolonial subjects to their space and history. It therefore becomes possible to identify the landmarks of the atypical character of diasporic identity in the novels of Schwarz-Bart, Condé and Agnant. The nursing home of Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Un plat de porc... and the psychiatric hospital in Le livre d’Emma fulfil a similar function, that of the dispossession by the colonizer of the personality and hence of the identity of the heroines. Schwarz-Bart and Agnant offer the reader a form of writing that deconstructs this dispossession through a discursive subversion on the heroines’ part. On the one hand, short of any support from the authority of the mother or the grandmother, Mariotte resists the machinery of alienation driven by M. Moreau through writing. She seeks to define herself instead of allowing herself to be defined as a Negress, that is, as a being without history, always predictable, an eternal slave, an illiterate condemned to speak nothing but the language known in Francophone cultures as “petit nègre.” The act of writing for Mariotte brings out the activity of memory which, though most often faulty, at least restores to the subject a basis on which to construct herself and from which she can project her own image and especially project her listeners into the future. The seven school notebooks in which Mariotte inscribes the narrative of her life constitute the writing of the subject. In other words, Mariotte imposes herself as the subject of her history and of the definition of her identity, not as a victim or an object. This is not to deny that the story is made up of traumatisms caused by violent separation from her homeland and a certain culture and linguistic amnesia: And if suddenly the words of my mother tongue left me […].This language that I no longer spoke was it not threatening to forget me completely […]. But today, it wasn’t just a piece of my life either but truly one of the foundations of my being that was crashing down! (Schwarz-Bart 1967: 71)

But the resurgence of certain apparently banal cultural landmarks such as the taste of a local dish of pork with green bananas seems to be fundamental to the construction of the subject: “The imagined taste of the food from home was burning so strongly that I started to scratch my throat

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so vigorously that it was starting to bleed, just to tear out…” (Ibid.: 143). Schwarz-Bart’s narrative strategy consists of an art of disruption, in particular the displacement of the usual schema of the search for identity toward a plurality of possibilities—memory, language, the culinary signs of culture—that defy the tyranny of tradition. The same strategy could be found at the heart of Ti Jean l’horizon (1979), an novel in which, as Kitzie McKinney points out, Simone Schwarz-Bart “deconstructs four myths traditionally associated with Antillean quest: the return to Africa, the power of the spirit world, the Promised Land of France, and the heroic, linear dimensions of machismo” (McKinney 1989: 655). On the other hand, Agnant’s project, based on the character of Emma, forms a part of the same powerful discourse of deconstruction of the fixed form of racial stereotypes as that of Schwarz-Bart. It is true that the narration, conducted by Flore, the heroine Emma’s interpreter, is homodiegetic. But thanks to the technique of narrative polyphony, certain narrative sequences are spoken by Emma who thus becomes, albeit intermittently, the author and subject of her own story. The centering of the postcolonial immigrant as the subject of her story becomes the narrative strategy that constitutes one of the resemblances between Un plat de porc... and Le livre d’Emma. The battle for writing on the part of Mariotte and the struggle for the management of speech on the part of Emma are ultimately the parameters of the same strategy: the appropriation of public speech as what determines the nature of the power and the definition of the self. In that respect, it becomes necessary to note the resemblances between Emma’s experience and that of the author who created her. In an interview with Patrice J. Proulx, Marie-Célie Agnant explains: […]. So I was already committed to this progressive speaking out, but I have to admit that I had to struggle with myself to manage to take up this speech and keep it. I was born in a country where, traditionally, women don’t have much say in anything connected with public discourse, I spent my entire childhood under that dictatorship and were at that time, all of us, children and adults, more silent than carps. Everything was condemning me to a lifelong silence, but that’s not in my nature, so I pushed forward (Patrice J. Proulx 2006).

The real spaces of Haiti that Agnant refers to and the fictional space of Montreal where Emma is interned in a psychiatric institution are the places of a difficult negotiation of speech. The authorities have imposed on Emma a label of mad woman, a strategy that deprives of public speech this doctoral candidate and

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historian of slavery. In the same way, Jean-Xavier Ridon, borrowing from Michel Foucault, affirms that “madness is defined in terms of a silencing where the psychiatric discourse alone claims the right to say it is madness, while that madness cannot speak for itself” (Jean-Xavier Ridon 1999: 223). The immigrant’s speech is defined in relation to an acceptable average, a psychiatric norm that comes with a threshold beyond which a seal of disapproval is affixed, making speech marginal and alienated. Furthermore, private speech, kept within the private space of the ward, is not only permitted to the immigrant, but actually encouraged, because this speech is constantly available to be translated, manipulated and, if need be, corrected. This helps us to understand the comments Emma makes concerning Doctor MacLeod: Once you’ve noted everything, you’ll write a book, right? And nobody will have the right to doubt your sources. They will be reliable, right? [...] and in this book you’ll get everything wrong. You’ll cover your tracks, you’ll doctor the figure, you’ll say what you think best, you’ll be the expert, and you, everyone will believe you, because your word is gold, little doctor. (Agnant 2004: 3)

These words of Emma directed at the doctor, the scorn of which is reinforced by her addressing him as “tu,” tell us a great deal about the way that the relationship between memory and history is negotiated by the “colonizer” and his acolytes Western “specialists” of History. Oral testimonies are gathered, and often, as is the case here, misappropriated, remodeled and finally elevated to the scientific status of History. Thus, in the environment of exacerbated racism, the colour of the skin, depending on whether it is white or black, would be enough to confer credibility or incredibility, authority of weakness, science or ignorance. The characters of Emma and Mariotte are constructed so as to resist the transformation of Caribbean identity in general and of postcolonial immigrant identity in particular, into museum pieces. According to this museological logic, black women confined to institutions, dispossessed of their personality would become specimens as much frozen in time as the Hottentot Venus. But Emma’s doctoral thesis for example, whose defence was refused by the “colons de Bordeaux,” and that they use to “wipe themselves,” implies that no human being has a fixed or definite identity, be he or she black or a descendant of slaves. That would explain what Emma says to Doctor MacLeod: “Are you ever going to stop sucking on your pencil, little doctor? What a shocked look on your face! What do you think? Since they left the cane fields, the Negresses have learned to reflect, she declares, detaching each syllable” (Agnant 2004: 32).

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On the other hand, the discourse of identity that emerges from Maryse Condé’s Desirada translates a reality that is as eclectic as the novel’s structural elements. Everything indeed tends to disqualify any form of unity. That is in fact the principal lesson that Marie-Noëlle learns at the end of her long quest for identity. The severing of the ties with her maternal ancestors helps her to understand the irrelevance of “the single root” in the construction of her identity. The choice of narrative form consolidates this idea. The novel excludes all monophony. The principal narrative told by a homodiegetic narrator needs the secondary narratives of the grandmother Nina, Ludovic and Reynalda. These secondary narratives mingle and intertwine in a kind of narrative harmony. This narrative polyphony echoes the Symphony of the New World, the musical work that Stanley dreams of composing. It was to be a mixture of Latin American, Caribbean and African rhythms (Condé 1997: 107). This symphony would be in the image of the diversity of the populations of the Americas. Beside the musical symphony there is also the racial symphony and the spatial symphony. The special framework of the novel is situated between Guadeloupe, France, the United States and Belgium, while many other spaces are evoked: Guinea, Ghana and Cuba for example. The isolation of the closed world of Traversée de la mangrove (Condé 1989) for example gives way in Desirada to an almost exacerbated opening up of the world. With Desirada we experience a deconstruction of the idea of the unique space, but also of the single root that would be adequate for the formulation of diasporic identity. Such an identity goes well beyond any fundamental belonging as described by Maalouf (Christiane Chaudet Achour 2006: 44), whether religious, racial, geographic, ethnic or national.

Conclusions The claim to speech by Caribbean women in the contemporary literary context ultimately leads to taking a position, whether openly or without ostentation. At a time when discourses on identity are becoming more and more numerous, the theoretical originality of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé and Marie-Célie Agnant, each one in her own way, can be found to a great extent in the implications of the epistemological rupture of the sacred filial connection in the construction of the postcolonial Caribbean immigrant’s identity. At a time when the canonical discourse is one of genealogical linearity that requires a particular, sacred relationship with the mother, with the grandmother, and with the feminine figure in general4 (Noëlle Carruggi 2009: 210), the three authors studied place their texts in a way of thinking that relies on this process of rupture that severs

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the tie between the immigrant and her maternal relatives of the previous generations. These writers also have in common a transgressive approach that suggests the refusal of a closed system of ivory towers of identity such as antillanité, créolité and africanité. The privileged narrative mechanism of these texts evokes instead the multiplicity of possibilities, and the opening to the plurality of discourses in the space of identity of the postcolonial immigrant subject. “In contrast to the Éloge de la créolité which imposes specific precepts and adopts the most normative possible tone” (Emmanuelle Vanborre 2010: 69), Schwarz-Bart, Condé and Agnant, in the dynamics of the narratives that they produce, allow for a broad gamut of possibilities in terms of identity, imaginary and writing. The implications of the profanatory act embedded in the writing of rebellious novelists ultimately lie at the level of the authorization of the postcolonial Caribbean immigrant to become a maroon, perhaps the writer as well, beyond an insular and geographic identity that has become too narrow.

Notes 1

Referring to “a recent flurry of discourses of identity in the Francophone world,” Jean-Marie Grassin defines the identity that emerges from these discourses as polymorphous and as heterogeneous as the Chinese encyclopedia spoken of by Michel Foucault. «L’émergence des identités francophones : le problème théorique et méthodologique», pp. 301-314, in Christianne Albert (Dir.). Francophonie et identités culturelles. Pais: Karthala, 1999, pp. 302; 304. 2 Borrowing from Levi, Agamben names « grey zone » the psychological zone where there takes place the « long chain that joins the victims to the executioners. » The oppressed becomes the oppressor; the executioner appears in turn as a victim (Agamben 1999: 18; 23). In this sense, Fifie, Emma’s mother, oppressed by the cyclone of which she is the victim, becomes the executioner of her daughter whom she hates for having too black a skin color. 3 The representation given of the character of Ludovic the first time Marie-Noëlle meets him identifies him as the ignoble agent of a game of masks in which he displays the face of the perfect father in contrast to the highly imperfect traditional father: Condé 1997: 40. 4 In an interview with Noëlle Carruggi, Maryse Condé declares: “In our home, the West Indies, all genealogies have to go through the women. One has to have a particular relationship with the women of one’s family. I myself didn’t have that relationship.”

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References Achour, Christiane Chaudet. « Identité, mémoire et appartenance : un essai d’Amin Maalouf », Neohelicon XXXII (2006), 41-49, DOI: 10.1556/ Neohel. 33.2006.1.4 Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue. Traduit de l’italien par Marilène Raiola, Paris : Seuil, 1997 (Titre original : Homo Sacer. I: Il potere sovano e la nuda vita. Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1995). —. Profanations, Dijon-Quetigny (France) : Nottetempo, 2005. —. Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz: L’archive et le témoin, Homo Sacer III, traduit de l’italien par Pierre Alferi, Paris : Payot & Rivages, 1999. Agnant, Marie-Célie. Le livre d’Emma. Saint-Étienne : Vents d’ailleurs, 2004. Carruggi, Noëlle. « Écrire en Maryse Condé. Entretien avec Maryse Condé, New York, 11 janvier 2009 » : 203-218, in Noëlle Carruggi (Dir.). Maryse Condé, Rébellion et transgressions, Paris : Karthala, 2010. Condé, Maryse. Desirada. Paris : Robert Laffont, 1997. —. Traversée de la mangrove, Paris : Mercure de France, 1989. Grassin, Jean-Marie. « L’émergence des identités francophones : le problème théorique et méthodologique » : 301-314, in Christianne Albert (Dir.). Francophonie et identités culturelles. Pais : Karthala, 1999. Maalouf, Amin. Les identités meurtrières. Paris : Grasset, 1998. Mbembe, Achille. De la postcolonie: Essai sur l’imaginaire politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine, Paris : Karthala, 2000. McKinney, Kitzie. « Second vision: Antillean Versions of the Quest in Two Novels by Simone Schwarz-Bart ». The French Review, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Mar., 1989) : 650-660. Moudileno, Lydie. « Le Rire de la grand-mère: Insolence et sérénité dans "Desirada" de Maryse Condé ». The French Review, Vol. 76, No. 6, Special Issue on Martinique and Guadeloupe (May, 2003): 1151-1160. Proulx, Patrice J. « Breaking the silence: an interview with Marie-Célie Agnant ». Quebec Studies, Spring-Summer, 2006. December 2013. Ridon, Jean-Xavier. «Maryse Condé et le fantôme d’une communauté inopérante» : 113-226, in Christianne Albert (Dir.). Francophonie et identités culturelles, Pais : Karthala, 1999.

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Schwarz-Bart, Simone et André. Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Shelton, Marie-Denise. « Condé: The Politics of Gender and Identity ». World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 4, Focus on Maryse Condé (Autumn, 1993): 717-722. Sourieau, Marie-Agnès and Condé, Maryse. « Entretien avec Maryse Condé: de l'identité culturelle ». The French Review, Vol. 72, No. 6 (May, 1999) : 1091-1098. Vanborre, Emmanuelle. « Écrire en marge de la théorie »: 67-82, in Noëlle Carruggi (Dir.). Maryse Condé, Rébellion et transgressions, Paris : Karthala, 2010.

PART VI : POSTCOLONIAL FRANCOPHONIE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE PARADOXES AND MYTHS OF FRANCOPHONIE THOMAS A. HALE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

The concept of francophonie has come under increasing fire in the last fifteen years for a variety of reasons. In the United States, instructors of French, departments of French, and textbook publishers view anything francophone or connected to francophonie as a lifeline in an era of diminishing enrollments and sales. The concept of a community composed of diverse French-speaking peoples promises to attract a wider range of students to courses, for example on francophone African and Caribbean literatures. Official Francophonie, the product of that new concept, gives a more visible face of that community to instructors, most of who are among the 10,000 members of the American Association of Teachers of French. But if francophonie in all of its forms, official and unofficial, is such a positive force for the promotion of French, what then is the source of criticism? There are many answers to this question, but most are rooted in a series of paradoxes and myths, to borrow a term from the book edited by Jones, Miguet, and Corcoran, Francophonie: mythes, masques et réalités (1996). They are related in some way to history, linguistics, politics, economics, geography, demography, literature, and academia. The purpose here is to examine some of those paradoxes and myths in order to give a more realistic picture of francophonie for those in this country who are most concerned about the survival of French today. Some of the examples described here have appeared in an earlier article titled “The Manifeste des Quarante-Quatre, Francophonie, la françafrique, and Africa: from the Politics of Culture to the Culture of Politics” (2009). Others are more recent, stemming in part from a graduate seminar on francophonie that I taught in Fall 2011. Finally, a penetrating and closely-argued new book by the Belgian scholar François Provenzano,

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Vies et mort de la francophonie: Une politique française de la langue et de la littérature (2011), offers an extraordinarily wide range of insights that complement in some ways the ideas presented here. All these and many other sources, including hundreds of studies on francophonie, are serving as the basis for a longer study now underway on the roles of francophonie in the relationship between France and Africa. There are many reasons for the emphasis on Africa. First, the organization that served as the foundation for institutional Francophonie, the Agence de Culture et de Cooperation Technique (ACCT), was launched at the initiative of three African heads of state, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, and Hamani Diori of Niger, at meetings in Niamey, Niger, in 1969 and 1970. Second, throughout the development of this movement to bring together francophone countries from around the world, Africans have played a central role. Ever since the ACCT gave birth to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) in 1997, Africans have served in the role of secretary general: Boutros Boutros-Ghali from Egypt followed by Abdou Diouf from Senegal. Although the OIF includes member and observer states from many parts of the world, the focus for France is on Africa. This was true at the time of the founding, as evidenced from detailed entries in the diary of Jacques Foccart, the presidential aide responsible for relations with Africa as well as with the francophone community. In volume III of this five-volume record, Foccart reports an exchange with President Georges Pompidou concerning the nomination of the Canadian Jean-Marc Léger to the post of secretary general of the ACCT. In the course of the conversation, Foccart declares that “francophonie is essentially Africa; therefore it is our affair.” (1999: 410)1 Later it was this focus on Africa by François Mitterand and Jacques Chirac that enabled France to maintain such a strong position in the developing francophone organization. More recently, in October 2011, during the campaign for the presidency of France, François Hollande met with Abdou Diouf to discuss the commitment of France to official Francophonie. The future president is reported by a confidant to have declared that he saw in Francophonie “an interesting framework for the advancement of democracy in Africa, without putting France too much out front”2 (Jeune Afrique, 5/25/12). Finally, in a complaint about the decreasing focus on French in the OIF, Pierre-André Wiltzer, former junior minister for foreign aid and francophonie, argued, “What will count for keeping French one of the great international languages is the number of persons who will really be able to speak it. The French language will be

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saved only if tomorrow Africa becomes a powerful reservoir of French speakers.” (2008) 3 But as francophonie in various forms attracts growing interest from scholars in books, colloquia, and other venues, the focus tends to be on the modern institutional presence in organizations such as the OIF and its partners, literature produced by francophone writers today, the different varieties of French they use, the current situation of French in each country, and other issues that are contemporary in nature. But it is precisely this synchronic perspective that has produced a myth about the phenomenon: francophonie has no history other than the fact that the French geographer Onésime Reclus coined the term in 1886. Provenzano remarks on this ahistorical view in the first sentence of his book. “The subject that will be examined in the following pages seems as haloed by vague evidence as it is lacking in history.”4 Drawing on sources that go back to the 18th and 19th centuries, however, he does manage to find a few precursors ranging from anthologies of literature produced outside of outside of France to meetings of scholars to address the question of how to promote French. Among the countries mentioned are Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada. The lack of a history of francophonie appears to be due to the France-centered view of the world. The interest of Reclus in francophonie was demographic: how to increase the number of people who speak or who learn French. One way was to colonize large areas of other continents in order to transform their peoples into French speakers. The title of one of his books reveals the boldness of this strategy: Lâchons l’Asie, Prenons l’Afrique (1904). At a time when France was competing with Europe for domination in Africa, land and language built political power. This is a theme that runs throughout the history of francophonie: power for France and, in the 20th century, strength from numbers for those countries that participate in the movement to develop multi-lateral French organizations. The title of a book by one of the most active participants in the launching of official Francophonie, Michel Guillou, conveys that sense of power: Francophonie-Puissance (2005). The political basis for all of this activity, as Wiltzer reminded readers above, is the protection and promotion of French, a project that inspires many to express their views in terms of combat and death, as seen in titles such as Pourquoi veulent-t-ils tuer le français? (2005), by Bernard Le Cherbonnier, France, Québec, Wallonie: Même combat! Libérons-nous tous de l’empire américain et retrouvons ensemble notre monde humain! (2008) by Albert Salon, and Combat pour le français (2006) and Contre la pensée unique (2012) by linguist Claude Hagège. Although these and similar works clothe the protection of French

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in terms of cultural diversity and other themes, at base the challenge is simply to promote the language. In 2008, to mark the day that the ACCT was created, March 20, 1970, Abdou Diouf, secretary general of the OIF, said it most directly when he declared that the first of several goals of the organization was to “promote the French language.” (Bouhours, 2008)5 The myth, then, that francophonie has no history does not hold if one traces back the promotion of French to its origins. Francophonie in its institutional form is only the most recent incarnation of a movement that began in the 13th century in France when French rulers in Paris set off over the next six centuries to conquer the rest of the Hexagone and even its neighbor across the English Channel. The goal of this long-term project was not simply to add land and peoples to the small kingdoms based in Paris. It involved what Manzano has described as “A rapid advance in the totalitarianism of French.” (2000)6 The term totalitarianism here may shock the reader with its echoes of German efforts to dominate France in later centuries, but Robert Cerquiglini, whose has focused his research on the history of French, emphasizes the link between language and power in the 16th century. Drawing on contemporary sources, he sums up the close relationship: “The king, whose speech is perfect, incarnates the language as he spreads it like weapons throughout the universe.” (2007: 26)7 But politics alone have not given French the extraordinary reputation it has enjoyed since the 16h century. The question is just how did it become the most prestigious language in Europe? As Cerqiglini points out, promoters of the language attempted to give it greater prestige by emphasizing both ties with the golden age of Latin and the contemporary use of the language by the nobility in Europe. The classic example is the essay by Antoine de Rivarol, “Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française” (1784). The ideas of Rivarol have sustained partisans of French and francophonie right down to the present. These notions contribute to what Provenzano has called the “euphoric objectification”8 (248) of the language by writers, politicians, and other partisans of the language. Africanists might call it “griottage,” the pejorative West African term for empty praise (Hale, 1998:15). This process is advanced by a phenomenon that one can only call a linguistic fallacy. The language acquires “clarity”9 and “genius,”10 qualities that Henri Meschonnic has dissected in his book De la langue française: Essai sur une clarté obscure, in particular chapters 1, “Ce que la clarté empêche de voir,” and 4, “Le génie de la langue: le mot” (1997). Deniau describes another amorphous quality as “a spiritual and mystic sense.” (1998: 17-18) 1 Many observers see French as the language of humanism because it is used to describe certain respected concepts such as democracy and human rights. It is a process of

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transference by which the qualities of the subject become traits of the medium, not simply language, but the French language. This is an echo in some ways of McCluhan’s notion that the medium is the ‘massage.’ The ‘massage’ here is French. It serves not only as a means to communicate but, in the view of many supporters of the language it even shapes the way the speakers think. This notion echoes a long-discredited theory advanced by the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Wharf, starting in the 1920s. Sapir in Language and Introduction to Speech (1921) and Wharf in his writings collected under the title Language, Thought, and Reality (1956), proposed that language shaped our perception of the world. Thus, one might conclude that those who speak French think the world in different terms. This essentialization of French has emerged in the 20th century because partisans of the language repeat it so often. The result is what Provenzano calls throughout his book francodoxie, a term that covers a wide range of phenomena, all contributing to the belief that French is superior to other languages. It is a concept that was dear to the founders of francophonie. A language with such apparent qualities is well suited for the civilizing mission of France to attract and shape the worldview of other peoples. Manzano sees the process of diffusing French as rapid, but in the case of France, there is evidence to suggest that, in fact, it was rather slow. According to the survey conducted in France by Abbé Gregoire for his Rapport sur la Nécessité et les Moyens d'anéantir les Patois et d'universaliser l'Usage de la Langue française presented in 1794 to the National Convention in Paris, only 11% of the population spoke French by the late 18th century. The spread of the language in France was largely completed only by the early 20th century after the government institution of a system of public education. In what is known today as francophone Africa, the spread of French followed a different path. Schools were not the primary means of educating people to speak the language, even though that myth persists today in spite of much evidence to the contrary. The construction of schools, hospitals, and roads, among other projects, was cited by proponents of the short-lived French law passed on February 23, 2005, to require schools in France to give a more positive view of France’s contributions to its colonies during the colonial era. The oft-cited stereotype of this centralized education was that every child in an elementary school in French West Africa who was learning French had to repeat that his ancestors were Gauls. This view supported the myth that the spread of French was via schools. The facts behind this stereotype are unsubstantiated, but whether or not this is true, evidence from many

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sources reveals that it was not until the waning years of the colonial empire, after World War II, that schools became a significant vector for introducing French. Instead, other factors combined to create a francophone population in Africa that was far superior in numbers, if not always in the quality of the French spoken, to the tiny minority who went to school. French arrived in Senegal in the 17th century via two interrelated vectors, sex and trade. The sex occurred in the compound of the Compagnie du Senegal in St. Louis in the late 17th century. There, the new director of the company, Michel Jajolet de La Courbe, observed with chagrin upon his arrival in 1685 that most men had an African companion, and those who didn’t had access to a group of women who lived in the compound. He tried in vain to stop this interracial sex (La Courbe, 1913: 26). But by the 19th century these kinds of relationships became semipermanent with unions of French colonials and women who composed a growing aristocracy. Known as signares, they produced generations of French-speaking children (Brooks, 2003: 270-272). Throughout this period, trade, the goal of the French who arrived in Senegal, depended on French-speaking African navigators who guided arriving ships across the treacherous bar at the mouth of Senegal River. This commerce relied also on men known as maîtres-langues, interpreters for French traders who dealt with diverse peoples living far up the Senegal River. La Courbe reported that chiefs had their own interpreters to make sure that they were not swindled by the French (1913: 128, 152). In all cases, it appears as though the francophone Africans picked up the language as the result of contact with the French rather than by any formal education. A few schools were established beginning in 1816, but in the decades that followed, they amounted to no more than a handful. By 1900, a variety of sources indicate that 1% of eligible children attended school. In his study of education in Africa, Moumouni reported that by 1924, there were only seven secondary schools in all of French West Africa (1964, 1998). The most powerful vector for the spread of French was military service. The many African soldiers who served in French armies from the early nineteenth century right up to 1960 included 350,000 men who fought for France during WWI and WWII (Witte, 2003, 29, 59). Most were illiterate and could not speak French when they were recruited. But they learned basic French during their service (Fogarty, chapter 4, “Race and Language in the French Army”, 2008). When they returned home many of them qualified for jobs as interpreters, civil servants, and teachers in the embryonic system of education. Cherif Keita reported to me in 2010 that

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his father was an exemplar of this tradition. When Nambala Keita returned after service with the French army during World War II, he started his own school which bears his name today. In contrast with trade, sex, and military service, the role of formal European-style education was so limited that by 1945, the end of the golden age of French colonialism, Senghor, one of the representatives of the colony of Senegal in the French parliament, complained that there were only enough schools for 5% of the eligible children (Chafer, 2002: 95). And in one of the oldest French colonies outside of Africa, Martinique, peopled almost entirely by descendants of African slaves, in 1945 only 40% of the children were able to attend school according to Aimé Césaire in a letter to the governor on June 20, 1945 (Hale, 1978: 255). As Claire Bouche confirmed in L’Enseignement dans les territoires française d’Afrique noire (1975), the goal was not to educate large numbers of children, but to build a few schools in order to form an elite who could serve the colonial mission. The spread of French, the foundation of francophonie in all its forms, was an integral part of France’s civilizing mission, but after de jure independence in francophone Africa in 1960, it became the top priority of French aid. Georges Pompidou explained in a speech at the Assemblée nationale on June 10, 1964, that “Of all the countries in the world, France is the one that is most concerned about the export of its language and perhaps of its culture. That is one of the needs of our way of thinking, of our culture”12 (Turpin, 2010: 218). For him, the primary weapon in the battle to defend French was foreign aid. In a discussion with Foccart about aid to several small countries in francophone Africa surrounded by anglophone neighbors, Pompidou warned that “as long as there is the language; one can always have the last word. If we let ourselves be beaten on francophonie, the game is lost”13 (1999: 575-576). But official Francophonie presented a paradox for France. If the government encouraged the formation of a multi-lateral organization based on French, it would be criticized as neocolonial. De Gaulle expressed this concern privately—and crudely—in exchanges with Jacques Foccart. Explaining why he wanted to send Malraux rather than prepare his own message to be read to the participants at the Niamey conference in 1969, he declared, “If I send a message, I will give the impression that I want to take the lead in this matter, and all the Belgians or others, who walk backwards like donkeys, will use this as a pretext and will say, ‘Ah, it is De Gaulle’s project, one cannot get involved in it’”14 (1998: 594). But the paradox is that this real concern masked another reality: France feared a dilution of its powerful influence on African countries that was based on bilateral

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relationships rather than on a multilateral international organization. These one-to-one ties included a variety of agreements on trade, banking, military training, education and other topics. But the most significant feature of this relationship was not revealed. France signed secret agreements to send in French troops to protect African leaders, all of whom, with one exception, were close friends of France. The form of the agreement was individual memoranda signed by African presidents with blanks for the date of military intervention (Chafer, 2002: 234; Foutoyet, 2009: 20). This device allowed France to intervene rapidly on two dozen occasions after 1960. These agreements, as well as a very close-knit personal relationship between the French president and each African leader, carefully nurtured by Foccart, constituted the foundations of these bilateral relationships. The African leaders, many of them dictators who would rule for decades, were to become the board of directors of the OIF. To embark, then, on multi-lateral relationships would be a mistake. But if France were to accept the creation of the multilateral ACCT, and if its involvement at the first meeting in Niamey in 1969 had to be lowprofile to allay De Gaulle’s concerns, for the second meeting in 1970 at which the ACCT was formed, Pompidou, less concerned than his predecessor about the charge of neocolonialism, wanted to make sure that France held the dominant position. This effort involved both money and personnel. Behind the scenes there was much concern about not being outdone on the matter of financing the 1970 meeting in Niamey. The cost was projected to be 800,000 francs. Ottawa was planning to provide the equivalent of 400,000 francs. There was not enough money in the budget of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so Pompidou charged Foccart on February 20, 1970, with the task find the money elsewhere. In addition to surpassing the Canadians in the funding for the meeting, Pompidou wanted to place a French representative in the position of head of the new organization rather than Jean-Marc Léger, the nominee of Canada. According to a report to Foccart by Pierre Billecoq, minister of education, who had met with Pompidou, the president delightedly proposed his own candidate. According to Billecoq, “Pompidou has found a sensational formula for counter-attacking. He is going to put forth the candidacy of Maurice Druon of the French Academy for the post of secretary general”15 (1999: 273). Another paradox in the politics of Francophonie is the membership of the OIF, both full members and observers. Some countries have multiple voices, the case for Canada, represented by the government in Ottawa as well as by the provinces of Québec and New Brunswick, and Belgium,

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represented by both the Kingdom and by the French community. Other members such as Albania, Egypt, Ghana, Greece, Macedonia and Moldova have little or no connection with French. This is the same case for the observer states, among them Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Ukraine. Today, the result, as Wiltzer has pointed out, is that francophone countries are in the minority of the entire list of 75 members and observers. The non-francophone countries, especially in Eastern Europe, have joined in order to build stronger ties to France, one of the two unofficial gatekeepers (Germany is the other) for membership in the European Union. With such a wide-open policy it may be surprising to discover that there is one country that has not been invited to join, Israel, which has a population of French speakers estimated at between 10 and 20 %. In 2007, the Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF) placed an advertisement in Le Monde titled “For the admission of Israel to Francophonie. The CRIF wants to call to the attention of the French political community the anomaly of the absence of Israel from the International Organisation for Francophonie, even though 20% of its people are francophone”16 (5/27/2007). The CRIF reported that a wide range of French politicians supported the appeal: Rocard, Royal, Sarkozy, Toubon, Stirn, Villepin, Bayrou, and others. It is not clear if it was the general membership of the OIF that opposed the admission of Israel, or if it was a decision by Jacques Chirac, who exercised considerable influence over the organization. Whatever the case, it is clear that France’s influence on membership and other aspects of the OIF’s operations is often quite direct. For example, Jacques Chirac nominated Boutros Boutros-Ghali for the leadership of the OIF when it was created in 1997 and its members announced that it would expand its mission to include politics. A Francophile Egyptian, BoutrosGhali had served a term as secretary general of the United Nations. But francophone African leaders were outraged by the nomination of a candidate from a non-Francophone country. They argued forcefully against the choice at the summit meeting of the OIF in Hanoi. Chirac persuaded the African members, the largest voting bloc, to accept his choice for two reasons. First he was able to draw on the carefullycultivated relations with African presidents that he maintained. Second, no one at the meeting could ignore the fact that France provides two thirds of the budget for the OIF and its partners, the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie, the Université Senghor, TV5, the Association Internationale des Maires Francophones, and the Assemblée des Fonctionnaires

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Francophones des Organisations Internationales. The data for this information comes from a variety of sources and in different forms. Another example of France’s influence, this time apparently unsuccessful, was in the operation of TV5. The five in the name refers to the partners who sponsor it: Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and France. TV5 presents itself as an independent network that provides programming about the francophone world to global audience. But when President Sarkozy proposed to consolidate all of France’s foreign broadcasting under the title France Monde, the other four partners protested this move to co-opt a partner agency of the OIF. Abdou Diouf pointed out that this would make TV5 simply an affiliate of France (Briel, 2008). But leverage of the protesters was limited by the fact that France provided 84% of the budget for the network. France, then, is the center of francophonie in so many areas. The peoples outside the Hexagone appear as the ‘other,’ particularly in literature. There are two classes of ‘membership’ in the community of French-speaking peoples, France and those who seek to attain what Provenzano has called the “norme.” The littérature-monde project, announced with great fanfare in 2006, aimed at putting all francophone literatures on an equal footing. But today this movement is viewed as a quixotic enterprise that has been unable to reach its goal of somehow adjusting the status of French literature and that produced by writers from outside of France to create a sense of equality for the global corpus of verbal art in French. The award of French literary prizes to writers from outside of France and the creation of other prizes reserved for these nonHexagonal authors appear as evidence of the one-way ‘rayonnement’ of French culture. The paradox of ‘otherness’ emerges in a variety of other ways, for example the separate shelving of books by francophone authors in bookstores and libraries. But this division leads to paradoxical situations in those parts of France that lie outside the Hexagone. Martinique offers an example of the problems arising from the distance, in this case racial and geographical, between center and periphery. For a forthcoming study of Aimé Césaire based on nearly 1,000 published texts by the author, Kora Véron and I discovered a number of seemingly contradictory comments relative to francophonie by government officials and by the late writer and political leader. Official visitors to Martinique often praised Césaire and Martinique as beacons of francophonie in the Caribbean. Publishers of textbooks sometimes presented him, Senghor, and other writers as exemplars of francophonie. But for Césaire, this otherness implied in the notion of francophonie did not mesh with the situation of Martinicans. A

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representative of the island in the Assemblée nationale for nearly a half century, Césaire deployed his skills as a political leader to demand equality for his constituents. One way, enthusiastically supported by the French Communist Party as well as by the population of Martinique, was to transform the island from a colony to an overseas department in 1948. But the change quickly turned out to be a failure, as Césaire often declared in the first years of existence of the new entity, because French legislators rejected a key provision in the law requiring that French social legislation be applied immediately to the new departments, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, and Réunion. In other words, he lived one of the most striking paradoxes of francophonie: he was a citizen of France, but was in many ways the ‘other,’ as demonstrated dozens of times in his speeches imploring the French government to deal with Martinican citizens on the same basis as their counterparts living in the Hexagone; equal pay, schools, housing, and retirement. His ‘otherness’ was manifest in the most shocking manner in some of the responses by other legislators to his speeches in the Palais Bourbon. A speech he gave on March 15, 1950, in which he criticized the Union française, produced a series of insulting cries from other legislators. The Union française, the euphemism for the term French empire after World War II, was invented to put a more positive veneer on the efforts, often violent, that France deployed to keep a firm grip on its colonies. The goal was to restore the prestige of the country after the humiliating defeat by Germany in 1940. What follows comes from the transcription of the debate that appeared in the daily record, Journal Official de la République française. Annales de l’Assemblée nationale: Aimé Césaire: - In truth, while in our territories, poverty, oppression, ignorance and racial discrimination are the rule, while more and more, in spite of the Constitution, you try everything to make the French Union not a union but a prison for peoples. (Exclamations to the left, center and right. Applause from the extreme left). Paul Caron: - You are quite happy that there is a French Union! Marcel Poimboeuf: - What would you be without France? Aimé Césaire: - A man from who people would not have tried to take his freedom. Marcel Poimbeuf: - That’s ridiculous! Paul Caron: - You are an insulter of the fatherland. (From the right): What ingratitude! Maurice Bayrou: - You’ve been quite happy that you’ve been taught to read! Aimé Césaire: You did not teach me how to write, Mr. Bayrou. If I learned to read, it is thanks to the sacrifices of thousands and thousands of

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Martinicans who have bled themselves dry so that their sons can receive instruction and so that they can one day defend them (Applause from the extreme left).17

Césaire’s responses contain an irony rooted in the description earlier that the spread of French was not the product of schools in the colonies. Aware of the shortage of classrooms on the island, Césaire’s parents sent him to learn French from another French-speaking person in Martinique: his grandmother. The renaming of the French empire as the Union française was not simply a step to hold on to the colonial empire, but in many ways it appeared, after the fact, as a precursor of francophonie. By implication, the French empire and its successors, the Union française and the Communauté française were, in the eyes of critics, simply predecessors of francophonie, what the novelist Alain Mabanckou called “the last avatar of colonialism”18 (2007). But for Césaire, when the concept of francophonie was launched as a cultural project a decade after the de jure decolonization of francophone Africa, there was no problem. Nevertheless, in 2001, in his first reference to francophonie, he chose his words carefully. One must invent new words because there are new realities that one must name. It is appropriate to fight to defend our language. Francophonie can also be a link, a form of solidarity. It is in our interest to create among francophone countries a community of interests. With tact and sensitivity. We have something in common, a culture, a history. (2001)19

By 2006, as the OIF political agenda became public and more countries were admitted in order to strengthen the organization, Césaire sensed what he saw as the colonial nature of official Francophonie. “When a government takes an interest in something, it can very well tend to make it a political instrument. Now, I am not the political instrument of anyone. (2006) 20 The problem of center and periphery in francophonie which has drawn such negative responses from writers and other critics also affects those in academia who contribute enthusiastically to the ‘rayonnement’ of the French language and culture. In the early 1970s, faculty in French, Romance Languages, and Modern Languages departments began to recruit instructors who could help with the shift from a hexagonal to a global perspective on French. But this worthy enterprise sometimes led to conflict and tension. Decisions to hire instructors who could teach courses on African and Caribbean literature were not always unanimous. In some units, students could not count the new courses for major requirements. In the folk history

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of this early period, one 20th century scholar asked his colleagues, “what do we need this voodoo for?” A department head of another unit, a distinguished 18th century French literature specialist, admitted to a job candidate that he was not eager to hire a francophone African specialist, but his younger colleagues had forced him to do so. Several decades later these same Africanists have moved from the margin to the center. A halfdozen have served or are serving as heads of departments that offer instruction in French in American universities. It is this change that has led in some cases to a sense of internal conflict: one is charged with the task of promoting French, but if one focuses too much on criticism of France, in particular on the more negative aspects of a colonial nature, for example high tolerance of France for the corrupt leaders of francophone African countries that it supports (Hale, 2009), one can be viewed as undercutting opportunities for external support from French sources. To raise criticism of Francophonie in any way, especially from an Africanist perspective, can appear as a challenge to the francodoxie described by Provenzano. Framed in the context of nearly a millennium of linguistic expansion in the service of greater political power, Francophonie appears, then, as a vehicle, at least in Africa, for what political scientists call smart power. After the hard power of colonialism and military intervention in Africa, culminating in the implication of France in the disastrous genocide in Rwanda (Coret and Verschave, 2005, Kroslak, 2008, La Pradelle, 2005, Saint-Exupéry, 2004), official Francophonie appears at first as an exemplar of soft power. A closer look at the paradoxes and myths surrounding institutional Francophonie today, however, reveals that France has gone a step farther toward what is now called smart power. The OIF exists with the strong financial and political support of France. During the Chirac regime, France intervened in OIF affairs only when necessary to provide what might be called diplomatically a course correction. Since then, president Sarkozy manifested less enthusiasm for francophonie, the community of French-speaking people, and Francophonie—the OIF. He came to focus more on the issue of French identity. What remains to be seen is France’s role in Francophonie after the election of François Hollande in 2012. The future of institutional Francophonie depends entirely on France. There is no shortage of information about the good works of Francophonie. They include better communication between Frenchspeaking peoples, notably thanks to the efforts of partner organizations such as the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie. It has developed a network of 784 institutions in 94 countries that provides a variety of services to students, instructors, researchers, and programs. These and

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other benefits of the OIF and its affiliated organisations need to be framed, however, in the larger picture that includes the paradoxes and myths marking the past and the present of francophonie in general. In other words, francophonie in all its forms needs to be viewed from a more nuanced perspective that is unobscured by francodoxie.

Notes 1

La francophonie, c’est essentiellement l’Afrique; par conséquent c’est nous. La francophonie est un cadre intéressant pour faire avancer la démocratie en Afrique, sans trop mettre la France en avant. 3 Ce qui comptera pour que la langue française reste une des grandes langues internationales, c’est le nombre des personnes qui la parleront vraiment . . . La langue française ne sera sauvée que si l’Afrique devient demain un puissanat reservoir de francophones. 4 L’objet dont il sera question dans les pages qui suivent semble autant nimbé d’une vague evidence que dépourvu d’histoire. 5 Promouvoir la langue française. 6 Une avance rapide dans le totalitarisme du français. 7 Le roi, dont la parole est parfaite, illustre la langue comme il la répand comme les armes dans tout l’univers. 8 Réification euphorique. 9 Clarté. 10 Génie. 11 Un sens spiritual et mystique. 12 De tous les pays du monde, la France est celui qui tient le plus profondément à l’exportation de sa langue et de sa culture. C’est là un besoin de notre pensée, peutêtre de notre culture. 13 Tant qu’il y a la langue on peut toujours avoir le dernier mot. Si nous nous laissons battre sur la francophonie, l’affaire est perdue. 14 Si je fais un message, j’ai l’air de vouloir me mettre en avant dans cette affaire, et tous les Belges ou autres, qui marchent comme des ânes qui reculent, en prendront prétexte et diront: ‘Ah! c’est une affaire de De Gaulle, on ne peut pas se lancer là-dedans’. 15 Pompidou a trouvé une formule sensationnelle pour contre-attaquer. Il va sortir la candidature de Maurice Druon, de l’Académie Française, pour le poste de secrétaire général. 16 Pour l’entrée d’Israël dans la Francophonie. Le CRIF a souhaité appeler l’attention du monde politique français sur l’anomalie que constitue l’absence d’Israël de l’Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, alors que 20% de sa population est francophone. 17 Aimé Césaire : En vérité, alors que, dans nos territoires, la misère, l'oppression, l'ignorance, la discrimination raciale sont de règle, alors que, de plus en plus, au mépris de la Constitution, vous vous ingéniez à faire de l'Union française non pas 2

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une union mais une prison de peuples... (Exclamations à gauche, au centre et à droite. Applaudissements à l'extrême gauche). Paul Caron : - Vous êtes bien content qu'il y ait l'Union française ! Marcel Poimbœuf : - Que seriez-vous sans la France ? Aimé Césaire : - Un homme à qui on n'aurait pas essayé de prendre sa liberté. Paul Theetten : - C'est ridicule ! Paul Caron : - Vous êtes un insulteur de la patrie. À droite : - Quelle ingratitude ! Maurice Bayrou : - Vous avez été bien heureux qu'on vous apprenne à lire ! Aimé Césaire : - Ce n'est pas vous, Monsieur Bayrou, qui m'avez appris à lire. Si j'ai appris à lire, c'est grâce aux sacrifices de milliers et de milliers de Martiniquais qui ont saigné leurs veines pour que leurs fils aient de l'instruction et pour qu'ils puissent les défendre un jour. (Applaudissements à l'extrême gauche). 18 Le dernier avatar du colonialisme. 19 Il faut inventer des mots nouveaux car il y a des réalités nouvelles qu'il faut bien nommer. Il convient de lutter pour défendre notre langue. La francophonie peut aussi être un lien, un facteur de solidarité. Nous avons intérêt à créer entre pays francophones une communauté d'intérêts. Avec tact et délicatesse. Nous avons quelque chose en commun, une culture, une histoire. 20 Quand un gouvernement s’intéresse à quelque chose, il peut bien tendre à en faire un instrument politique ; or je ne suis l’instrument politique de qui que ce soit.

References —. France: François Hollande et la francophonie. Jeune Afrique, 5/25/12 , December 2013. Bouche, Denise. L’Enseignement dans les territoires français de l’Afrique occidentale de 1817 à 1920: mission civilisatrice ou formation d’une elite? Lille: Atelier Reproduction des Thèses, Université Lille III. Paris: Champion, 1975, 2 volumes. Bouhours, Damien. “FRANCOPHONIE í Abdou Diouf: ‘Nous pouvons être fiers de notre langue.”’ Le Petit Journal. 20 mars 2008. December 2013. Briel, Robert. TV5 Partners Rebel Against France. Broadband TV News, Nov. 15, 2011. December 2013. Brooks, George. Eurafricans in Western Africa. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2003. Césaire, Aimé. Vers l’application de la loi sur l’obligation scolaire. Le Cri des jeunes, August 10, 1945, in Les Ecrits d’Aimé Césaire:

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bibliographie commentée. Thomas A. Hale. Etudes françaises 14/3-4 and Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978: 255. —. [speech] Journal Official de la République française. Annales de l’Assemblée nationale, March 15, 1950: 2075-2079. —. Aimé Césaire : Je ne suis pas pour la repentance ou les reparations. L'Express, September 13, 2001: 26-30. —. Mon stylo Kataroulo. Nouvelles études francophones, 21/1, printemps 2006: 9-20. Cerquiglini, Bernard. Une langue orpheline. Paris: Minuit, 2007. Chafer, Tony. The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonisation? Oxford: Berg, 2002. Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France. Pour l’entrée d’Israël dans la Francophonie. Le Monde, 5/20/2007. Coret, Laure and François-Xavier Verschave. L’horreur qui nous prend au visage: L’Etat français et le génocide au Rwanda. Rapport de la Commission d’enquête citoyenne. Paris: Karthala, 2005. Deniau, Xavier. La Francophonie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, collection "Que sais-je?" 4e edition, 1998. Foccart, Jacques. Le Général en Mai. Journal de l’Elysée, II. Paris: Fayard-Jeune Afrique, 1998. —. Dans les bottes du Général. Journal de l’Elysée III. 1969-1971. Paris: Fayard-Jeune Afrique, 1999. Foutoyet, Samuël. Nicolas Sarkozy ou la Françafrique décomplexée. Brussels: Tribord, 2009. Gregoire, Abbé Henri. Rapport sur la Nécessité et les Moyens d'anéantir les Patois et d'universaliser l'Usage de la Langue française, cite in Graham Robb, The Discovery of France. New York: Norton, 2008. Guillou, Michel. Francophonie-Puissance. Paris, Ellipses, 2005. Hagège, Claude. Combat pour le français. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006. —. Contre la pensée unique. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012. Hale, Thomas A. Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. —. The Manifeste des Quarante-Quatre, Francophonie, la françafrique, and Africa: from the Politics of Culture to the Culture of Politics. International Journal of Francophone Studies, 12. 2/3, 2009: 171-201. Jones, Bridget, Arnauld Miguet, and Patrick Corcoran. Francophonie: mythes, masques et réalités. Paris: Publisud, 1996. Kroslak, Daniela. The French Betrayal of Rwanda. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. La Courbe, Michel Jajolet de. Premier voyage du Sieur de La Courbe fait à la Coste d’Afrique en 1685. Ed P. Cultru. Paris: Champion, 1913.

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La Pradelle, Géraud de. Imprescriptible: l’implication française dans le génocide tutsi portée devant les tribunaux. Paris: Les Arènes, 2005. Lecherbonnier, Bernard. Pourquoi veulent-t-ils tuer le français? Paris: Albin Michel, 2005. Mabanckou, Alain. Le chant de l’oiseau migrateur, in Pour une littératuremonde., ed. Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007: 55í66. Manzano, Francis. De la dynamique du français: langue d’état et de pouvoir, in L’expansion du français dans les Suds, ed. A. C. Dubois, J.-M. Kasbarian, and A. Queffélec. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2000: 59í76. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam, 1967. Meschonnic, Henri. De la langue française. Essai sur une clarté obscure. Paris: Hachette, 1997. Moumouni, Abdou. L’Education en Afrique, Paris: Présence Africaine. [1964] 1998. Provenzano, François. Vies et mort de la francophonie: Une politique française de la langue et de la literature. Bruxelles: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2011. Reclus, Onésime. France, Algérie, colonies. Paris: Hachette, 1886. —. Lâchons l’Asie, Prenons l’Afrique: Où renaître? et comment? Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1904. Rivarol, Antoine de. Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française, 1784. Paris: Larousse, 1936. Saint-Exupéry, Patrick de. L’inavouable: La France au Rwanda. Paris: Les Arènes, 2004. Salon, Albert, France, Québec, Wallonie: Même combat! Libérons-nous tous de l’empire américain et retrouvons ensemble notre monde humain! Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. Sapir, Edward, Language and Introduction to Speech. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1921. Turpin, Frédéric. De Gaulle, Pompidou, et l’Afrique (1958-1974): Décoloniser et coopérer. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2010. Wharf, Benjamin. Language, Thought, and Reality. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1998. Wiltzer, Pierre-André. Recentrer la Francophonie sur sa mission centrale: la promotion de la langue française. Revue Internationale et Stratégique 71, special issue on L’avenir de la Francophonie. automne 2008: 131í134.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN FRENCH FROM WITHIN: COLONIAL LEGACY AND POSTCOLONIAL POLICY OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN AFRICA KAMAL SALHI UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

Lasting Legacy French is the official language of many former French colonies, known today as the ‘Francophone world’, even though some local languages are spoken by a larger percentage of the population.1 This is because the selection of an official language in post-independence Francophone countries was in part a function of imperialism: nationalist concerns driven by the desire to communicate effectively with all parts of the country and the need to spare resources to build national unity made French the only integrative alternative. It is true that the prestigious and powerful position of French as a colonizer language was challenged for several decades by local languages despite the integrative nature of French colonialism, but some post-independence states viewed the introduction of local languages both as a threat to the political power of their elites, and as a sign that they might become dominated by ethnocentrism. Ultimately the language of colonisation was seen as neutral rather than tribal in that it did not belong to any of the indigenous linguistic groups which might be seen as competitors to national political power. Historically, former French colonies have been without a unifying lingua franca. With the consolidation of Muslim rule in northern Africa, Arabic fulfilled such a role, especially among the political elite, but French came to fill a void: for more than a century it has served and continues to serve as a langue véhiculaire among the segment of the population with at least a high school-level education, if not as the official language of many states of Africa. In post-independence Africa, there has developed a sharp

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rivalry between Arabic and French and on-going competition between one of these two languages and national/ethnic languages for the position of official language. I argue that the question of the presence of French in former French colonies is not controversial. It is a historical fact that French as a language has existed in those countries that are now known as the Francophone world. The fact that the language has been elected to be used in politically independent French-speaking countries as a medium of administration, education, and literature means that the language has become a national heritage for francophone countries. The following study of the French language in Francophone Africa will inevitably have to be set in the context of the preoccupations that Francophones themselves have about the importance of their own languages, other than French. These preoccupations can be defined, in their relationship to France and post-independence governments, not only from a postcolonial point of view but also from the understanding that national/ethnic languages represent an essential dimension of the current development of Francophone countries in Africa. Today, French is still the dominant code of the leaders and elites of the Francophone polities. It is also ostensibly the language of the courts, although in practice many judges have been observed using French only perfunctorily while depending on vernacular languages for most court room communication. French is also the language officially utilised by ministries and information services, although it is probably the case that most relevant information is actually disseminated by word of mouth in local codes, rather than through official publications or announcements. The implementation of linguistic policy, together with the language selection known as ‘language planning’ in many countries of North and sub-Saharan Africa, entails using different local languages for primary education while using French in secondary and higher education. Examples of this include the use of Wolof, Penhl, and Senere in Senegal, Kinyarwanda in Rwanda, Maussa and Haussa in Niger, Malinké-Bambara in Mali, Arabic and Berber in North Africa (see Dumont &Maurer, 1995;Manessy, 1994). At first one might suspect that this is part of a progressive educational agenda, driven by the scientific evidence which indicates that young children learn best in their first language, for indeed this is an important part of the reasoning behind the movement to teach the children of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, in local codes instead of French. This agenda also motivates the proposal to replace the ‘foreign language’ with ‘national languages’ in the education system. However, in North Africa the ability to speak French is nearly universal, while in subSaharan Africa only part of the population can speak any of the hundreds

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of tribal languages. Schoolchildren in some regions are actually being taught in their own local languages. Wolof, for example, the language understood by the largest percentage of the Senegalese population, constitutes the first language of less than half of the Senegalese population (Mansour, 1980). Pervasive multilingualism within each nation has been used by most African political leaders as an excuse to avoid the initiation of indigenously based language policies. As a consequence, most African states have retained the status quo whereby French continues to serve as either the exclusive official language or as the medium of instruction in education (see e.g. Daoud, 2001; Djité, 2000; Masagara, 1997). This process, the legacy of colonialism, is disseminated from within. What is often little realised about the Empire is that in the act of seemingly colonising its subject nations, these nations themselves, though unknowingly, colonised the empire, as well. Agency is not merely unidirectional but is, in fact, multivalent. A system of cultural territorialisation has been deconstructed, disseminated, and fragmented under the burden of its own expansion. The act of colonial-imperialism changed the empire irrevocably from the moment of the initial imperial impulse. The French Empire stood less for territorialisation than for the Franco-conception of that territorialisation. The lines of communication and discourse linking France to its colonies, while controlled and maintained by the agents of empire, simultaneously masked an overabundance of alternative stories told and retold along the same lines, and the stories of counter-cultures proliferated within, across, and beneath the direct and official systems of communication and exchange. Lines of communication and exchange within contemporary world cultures are now fragmented, widened, globally dispersed, and complexly intertwined. This has inevitable consequences for discourses on nation formation and for the way in which postcolonial populations conceive the idea of ‘motherland’. The term ‘postcolonialism’ frequently connotes an all-embracing binarism between ‘self’ and ‘other’, the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘settler-invader’, the familiar and the strange: ‘at some point the postcolonial becomes an uncontrollable Manichean tendency to divide all discourses, including literature, into that produced by the oppressors and that by the oppressed’ (Williams, 1989: 26). Postcolonial African states, with a few exceptions, have continued colonial-era cultural and language policies. This leaves Francophone Africa and other parts of the world where the French once ruled with a vestigial system, but this legacy serves the continent’s nationalist and pluralist interests well. French-educated Léopold Sédar Senghor, the African intellectual and leading voice of la francophonie, ‘[was] not merely a “Frenchified” African who tried to give exotic interest

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to his French poems; he is an African who uses the French language to express his African soul’ (Ulli Beier, quoted in Crowder, 1962: 38).

Language and Politics in Africa Colonisation imposed French as a lingua franca in Africa and France’s colonies, but the colonised used rhetoric to serve as a surrogate for real power. Much of what Africans could accomplish in a colonial context was, almost by definition, marked by extreme power imbalances, depending on rhetorical skills and political oratory. African leaders were not only interested in the practice of oratory; they were also very much interested in the tool – the French language per se – that allowed access to the practice of oratory. The former colonial language was adopted as the official language in nearly all of the postcolonial states and leaders frequently referred to language in the context of larger political goals and plans. Reinvestment in the ‘colonial language’ was motivated by a desire to build national unity through a ‘not ethnically marked’ medium and to maintain contacts with the Western world, deemed necessary to attain a desired level of development. Some Francophone leaders tried to stretch the symbolic possibilities of French and turn them into symbols of “Africanness.” Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first President of Senegal, often proclaimed his confidence in the universal potential of French, arguing that it had absorbed cultures from all over the world and that it had been transformed into the medium of the Civilisation de l’Universel, of which African cultures were now part and parcel. Through the use of French, Africans would give the fullest expression to their modern “Africanness.” Leaders also often intervened in the field of local languages, often called ‘ethnic’ languages by African leaders and linguists alike. Kamuzu Banda, for instance, decided in 1968 that, ‘in the interest of national unity’, Chinyanja would be adopted as the national language of Malawi. Since Chinyanja was not solely Malawian— it was also spoken in Zambia, Mozambique, and Tanzania—Banda decided that the language would be called ‘Chichewa’ (see Chauma et al., 1997; Kayambazinthu, 1998). The colonial legacy of an image of Africa as a nightmarish Tower of Babel (Mazrui, 1967)2 had placed language high on the agenda as a necessary precondition for unifying the multilingual, multiethnic agglomerates grouped in ‘nations’ that had been created by the colonialists. These attempts often resulted in a pyramidic, hierarchical pattern in which the former colonial language occupied the top, a selection of local languages the middle and the other local languages the bottom.

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French was often the language of higher education, of business, government and the law; the privileged local languages were often ‘national’ languages that could be used during national rituals, and in some places were also the languages of primary education and local government; the remaining languages were relegated to local in-group communication (see Laitin, 1992). The issue of language in Africa is, therefore, to a large extent a political one. It is somewhat problematic to argue that ‘language planning and language policy belong to those areas which have been least affected by political developments in Africa since the end of the colonial period’ (Heine, 1992: 23). Perceptions of this kind may be based on the fact that French remained a prestige language after independence in many African countries. This prima-facie status quo, however, obscures the intensive politicisation of language in almost every African country, expressed in elaborate discourses on language, culture, and society, crystallising in vehement debates over crucial issues such as freedom and democracy, equality of opportunity and emancipation, and applied to crucial sociopolitical and cultural instruments such as art, education, and the media (see Madumalla et al., 1999). Whatever the strategy adopted, the determination of the specific language or languages to be employed for nationwide purposes confronted the policymakers in the new post-independence African states in the 1960s with difficult choices. The new independent states did not start by wiping the slate clean as far as language was concerned. They had to contend with a colonial heritage of more than a century in arriving at their decisions. A fundamental aspect of this colonial heritage is the lasting position of preeminence accorded to the language of the colonial ruler in the affairs of post-independence countries.

Empowering the Vernacular The earliest Christian enterprise in Africa stemmed from two centres, one in Egypt, the other in the Roman province of Tunisia, Carthage. The North African Church was essentially a colonial Church, with its outreach limited almost exclusively to government officials, military garrisons, and the Latin-speaking elite. However, the Church also showed a missionary spirit, translating its scriptures and liturgy into the African languages of the indigenous people (e.g. Berber and Coptic dialects, etc.). The Orthodox and Copts in the north-east, the Catholics and Donatists in the rest of North Africa, undermined the first African Church to the extent that it was almost completely overwhelmed by the advance of Islam in the 7th century. Only in part did Christianity persist, in the Kabyle region of

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Algeria and South Sudan, for example, until the present day. For six hundred years France sent no missionaries to Africa. Then the 13th and 14th centuries witnessed abortive attempts to evangelise the Muslims of North Africa. An opportunity was opened up in new lands south of Sahara by the exploration of the Coastline of Africa, and by the 15th century missions were operating in west to central lands. Yet within three centuries this era of Christianity died out and it was not until the last two centuries that the missionary movement attempted to plant Christianity on the soil of Africa. This time Christianity reached to the common people in their vernaculars, not merely to the educated elite in the French language (Calvet, 1974; Charles-Roux, 1939). Islam appeared set to inaugurate a revolution in time among its converts in Africa to counter most European influence. France failed to make Africa observe the clock with the same attentiveness with which it observed the clock under Islamic stimulation. The muezzin calling believers to prayers is a more compelling alarm clock in Muslim Africa than the Greenwich time signal. In many parts of Francophone Africa the sermon is entirely in Arabic, although the bulk of the congregation south of the Sahara might not understand the Arabic language. Some degree of Africanisation of the ritual has taken place, including the introduction of local languages; in the Amazigh (Berber) regions of North Africa the ritual is conducted with a mix of Arabic and the varieties of the Amazigh language. The prayer itself, involving bowing to God, kneeling and prostrating before God, is usually accompanied by oral recitations from the Qur’an entirely in Arabic. There is also a remarkable language-specific feature concerning Islam in relation to Christianity in Francophone Africa, not unlike the role of Latin in Medieval Europe. Most Muslim children, when required, have to learn the art of reading and reciting the Qur’an in Arabic even if they do not understand what the words really mean. That is why Muslim schools in North and West Africa are referred to as Qur’anic schools. Ironically, the best and prominent literature in French was produced by writers who attended those Qur’anic schools, such as Kateb Yacine, despite the emphasis on the verbal mastery of the Holy Book. Islam in Africa, therefore, is linguistically uncompromising, demanding due conformity with the language in which God communicated with humankind. On the other hand, expanding Christianity in Africa has often communicated with Africans in their own vernacular languages. The Bible was often translated into indigenous African languages before the Qur’an, services in African churches were often conducted in African languages, and hymns often sung in indigenous tongues. The forging of any new language policy

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in the post-independence period in the new states had to take account of this heritage. In Francophone Africa, there are undeniable factors that militate against the continuation of the status quo with a foreign language occupying a position of pre-eminence in the life of independent countries. Among these is the matter of national identity, implicitly recognized by Christianity’s vernacularizing attempts in Africa, mentioned above. Considerations of national self-respect are not without relevance in respect to language, since it touches the entire national life of a people so intimately and is a sensitive point of honour in the field of international contacts. Thus one could argue that a continuation of the status quo in respect to language undermines the self-respect of the African masses, and that a ‘foreign language’ is a symbol of ‘slavery’. Nationalist Africans, especially in the North, often argued that eradicating “the infatuation with French” was an essential prerequisite for freedom, and pressed for French to be banished as a cultural usurper, just as the colonial authorities were successfully driven out. These ideas have been associated with the Arabisation policies pursued in the North African countries (see e.g. Benrabah, 1999; Daoud, 2001). A second factor that favours attempts to remove the ‘foreign language’ is the populist strain in the politics of the new states. In states where nationalist movements really assumed the nature of a mass movement, one consequence has been the great emphasis on the innate goodness, the inherent genuineness of the masses, in the belief that authority derives its legitimacy from the people, and in the desirability and necessity of identification and contact with the masses. Here, a ‘foreign language’ aroused opposition precisely because in the countries under French colonial rule competence in French had become the defining characteristic of the elite. The ‘foreign language’, in fact, created two nations – a small minority educated in French, attached to the ruling class, and the illiterate masses, segregated and isolated from each other, with little mutual comprehension and empathy. But the attempt to narrow the gap between the elite and the mass by eliminating French is likely to create difficulties in communication among the elites of the different linguistic regions of Francophone Africa. The removal of French in North Africa, therefore, is felt by nationalist advocates of Arabisation, for instance, to be essential to the achievement of ‘autonomy’ and dynamism in the intellectual and cultural spheres in the postcolonial states. This is why it became imperative for pro-Arabisation officials–often encouraged by the influential Iraqi and Syrian Baath

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regimes–to break the link with the ‘foreign language’which served as the ‘instrument’ of such domination.

Francophone Africa and its Paradoxes If the above provides powerful reasons for the displacement of French from its dominant position in administration and education, there are equally powerful factors that have supported, if not the complete perpetuation of the status quo, at least the continuing importance of French as ‘the foreign language’. First, there is the very real power of inertia. It is no easy task to remove a lingua franca of one and a half centuries or more. There were likely to be no local languages with adequately developed terminology for the purposes of education at all levels and administration, precisely because they had not been so used in the past. The response to this could have been to develop the local languages, and while this has been done to some extent, the initial fervour for complete change has not been maintained. Second, any system that persists over a period of many decades creates and sustains many related interests which seek to perpetuate that system. The bureaucracy in most Francophone African countries, which has been used to conducting official business in the ‘foreign language’, frustrates efforts to bring about change. Regions and ethnic groups, which have achieved a superior comparative position in the administrative services due to greater facility in French resulting from the earlier impact of colonial rule, oppose any change in status. The highly influential ‘foreign language’ press is often the platform as well as the spokesperson for all these groups. Third, the replacement of French by a local language would create tensions between different groups within the states of Africa. The selection of one language (e.g. Arabic) in a multilingual situation to serve as the official language would create resentment on the part of other language groups who would label it as a new ‘imperialism’, declaring this language to be even more alien to them than the ‘foreign language’. This is not merely a matter of psychological resentment: while the elevation of one language to the status of lingua franca might endow great benefits and advantages on those whose first language it is, it would also place a discriminatory burden on all others and the emerging independent state may have to confront such a situation. As a consequence, groups that would be placed in a disadvantaged position have pressed for the continued use of the ‘foreign language’ that appeared to be associated with the same costs and benefits for all groups. Although there is one dominant

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African language in Senegal, Wolof, which is the native language of more than 40% of the population but spoken and understood by 80%, policymakers have been wary of the tribal conflicts which could be produced if one language were to be elevated above the others.3 For this reason, Senegal has decided to elevate the six most prominent native languages to the status of ‘national languages’ and codify them so that they can be written and used in the education system next to French. Again, the status quo in language choice imposed some costs in relation to national or regional objectives. Arabic has been adopted, without real consultation with the people, as the official language of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco since independence for the official business of these countries, for their ‘unity’4, and for purposes of interstate communication. Arabic was not chosen because it is better developed than the other regional languages, nor because its literary output has been larger or superior, nor because large numbers of works in the sciences and other branches of modern knowledge have been published in it. It was chosen to perform the job of the official language medium on pan-Arab levels because it is assumed to be understood, and spoken by the largest number of people (Benrabah, 1999; Ouerdan, 1993). For the advocates of Arabic as an official language, the weight of relative numbers, the sense of urgency about replacing French, and the feeling that only one language–obviously Arabic–can be the official language have represented compelling arguments for this policy. Observers of the language situation in North Africa, however, should not be in a great hurry to remove French from the official status it had during colonisation or as the medium of advanced academic communication. The idea of French as the symbol of foreign domination lost its relevance after independence, and since the countries of North Africa had accepted ‘foreign’ elements (i.e. Arabic, Turkish, Latin) in different aspects of their national life, they could also accept French. For many North Africans the increasing intensity of language rivalry has contributed to an increasing attachment to French (Wardhaugh, 1987).5 The question of the stage of development of a language that aspires to be the official language is not irrelevant. Moreover, official status for Arabic is likely to favour the political, economic, social, cultural, and educational power of the Arabic elite. Not only that, the issue of langue véhiculaire brings with it the problem of who is connected by these forms of communication. At the level of the relatively immobile rural life in North Africa, one would expect the varieties of the Berber language spoken there to be adequate. This is also likely to be true in urban areas. Despite the popularity of spoken Arabic, often called l’arabe populaire (a vernacular

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form of Arabic), the need for a langue véhiculaire in the form of standard Arabic is not generally appreciated. For the educated community, French has served as such an effective link, with classical Arabic being used to a limited extent in ritual, media, formal, and academic communication (Benrabah, 1999). In none of these cases is official standard Arabic able to play a very significant role. Neither French in elite communication, nor the Berber varieties and the popular, spoken Arabic used in the mass media, are easy to displace. Since independence, Arabic has become the symbol of a new domination of North Africa. The attempts to impose Arabic are widely viewed as an effort to raise the profile of the five North African states within the ‘Arab union’ or the ‘Arab nation’ as the Maghreb arabe. Thus the opponents of Arabic appear to build their case on the following grounds: a general suspicion regarding the present and future capability of Arabic and its potential for being accepted at a national level, fear about the dominance of the Arabic elite over the national life, reluctance to dislodge French from its role as a link language, and a concern for the equal treatment of the different varieties of Berber. During the post-independence period there has always been an Arab(ic) hegemony within the political culture that ruled in the countries of North Africa. This, associated with the military in power and state control over language and cultural affairs, constitutes a real dominance that, for example, the Berber populations of Algeria and Morocco have since resisted. This dominance, often named after the Iraqi/Syrian baath ideology (i.e. Baath parties calling for Arab nationalism based on the Arabic language and culture), is termed in the concept of Baathism, opposed by the Berber cultural movement. In the aftermath of independence (1960s and 1970s) the Algerian Government called for strong education co-operation with the above Arab countries (Salhi 2002; see also Benrabah 1999; Boukous 1999; Gill 1999; Suleiman 1994). The choice of Arabic as the official language of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and the linguistic rivalry which is partly a result of this choice, can be studied meaningfully within the broader structure of the group politics that is characteristic of language politics in North Africa. What is more important is that: Morocco is a multilingual country, whose complex sociolinguistic landscape is characterised by bilingualism and diglossia. Officially, however, it has one national and official language, ‘Arabic’. Arabisation has consistently been the basis of Moroccan language policy since Independence in 1956, and yet the language of Arabisation has never been the first language of any Moroccan. The vast majority of Moroccans

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actually speak a dialect of Moroccan Arabic or a variety of Berber, while French is widely used in education, business and commerce, the media and elsewhere (Marley, 2002: 335).

The situation is no better in Algeria: Despite the numerous Arabisation laws introduced with the aim of imposing Arabic as the sole national language, Algeria is still a multilingual country where at least three languages are in competition . . . The first language is Berber or Tamazight, which is the language of the indigenous people of North Africa. Although this language is mentioned in none of the country’s constitutions, it has succeeded in achieving a certain degree of official recognition as a result of social pressure—including strikes, riots and demonstrations—from the Tamazight-speaking populations. The second language is Arabic, a diglossic language whose High variety has been declared constitutionally the national and official language of the country. The Low variety is viewed as a degraded form of pure Arabic and therefore has no official status. Like Tamazight, it is classed in the derogatory category ‘dialect’. The objective of all governmental linguistic laws has been to eliminate all dialects and replace them with High Arabic. The third language is French, which is the country’s linguistic inheritance from the colonial period (Aitsiselmi, 2002: 377).

The obvious resemblance between hegemonic politics and interestgroup politics may tempt one to apply generalised theories prevalent in modern political science in seeking an understanding of North African language politics and its relation to North African political development in general. This is a strong temptation because the situation in Tunisia replicates the policies pursued in Morocco and Algeria, and offers further evidence of careful planning: With a population of almost eight million people, Tunisia is a country of complex sociolinguistic patterns characterised by Arabic/French bilingualism, closely linked to a diglossic situation where Arabic is concerned. The Berber language, having survived competition from Phoenician, Latin, Arabic, Turkish and French, is now only spoken by 1% of the population in the extreme south of the country. There are still some traces of Turkish in the form of prefixes and suffixes, but only in colloquial Arabic. As for French, it made its appearance in the country long before the 1881 French Protectorate and has survived Tunisian Independence. It is Arabic however, in its various forms, that remains the real language of the country. This makes for a very complex situation that, added to various political problems linked in particular with Independence,

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The model imposed on the post-independence North African countries was authoritarian, and it has only been possible to bring about change by means of military coups.6 The elite in command had compromised the future of ordinary Africans. France had kept close links with their former indigenous administrators and officers, exploiting them as subordinates in a corrupt postcolonial system, within which they relayed commands to their native people. To this end, France took care to ensure that these privileged groups were taught French language and culture. These évolués also went to France to attend schools and even work in Paris with the French government. They learned tactics that could be used to govern and easily subjugate their own people, and became the leaders of their countries during and after decolonisation. The divisions that characterised most postcolonial African states are apparent in the creation of dominating bourgeois-type classes that enjoyed strong support from their French counterparts. France did not encourage these states to set up democratic institutions, but influenced the corrupted African leaders so that the ‘Cooperation Policy’ and the ‘Aid Programmes’ in the field of education, for instance, were subsidised in order to maintain the status quo. This corrupt nature of the system supported by France is nowhere better expressed than in Mbaku’s statement that corruption in Africa ‘is a direct consequence of poorly developed institutional arrangements and distorted incentive structures. The latter allowed the elites who captured the state at independence to turn governance structures into instruments for their selfenrichment’ (Mbaku, 2002: 5). The states ruled by this elite have been characterised by neopatrimonialism and clientelism and other political practices used by Francophone leaders to reward the loyalty of their subordinates and maintain their grip on power. As in all dictatorships, the governing elite in many postcolonial African countries minimises free expression and dissent by restricting and controlling the media, thus reducing it to a mouthpiece of government policy. Under this kind of leadership, the general public has remained generally uneducated and ignorant of world politics—their main concern being the struggle for food—and forcefully persuaded that democracy is not a viable option. Ironically enough, this position was echoed by former French President Jacques Chirac who presented democracy to Africans as ‘a luxury that developing countries cannot afford’ (Wauthier, 1995: 552). While still maintaining a tight hold over its former colonies, where the French language has a privileged position, France has often been ‘selective in its criticism of authoritarian behaviour’

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(Thompson, 2000: 153). In recent movements towards modernity, there has also tended to be a narrowing of the gap between literary languages and the more popular native languages (see Fardon & Furniss, 1984).

‘National and Minority’ Languages from a Policy Perspective Policy mediates the relationship between the individual and the community, including aspects of individual creativity and group behaviour. Policy can also serve to mediate relations between groups within a given society. French policies are of several different kinds: monolingual, as when they undermine regional languages in France by promoting French as the sole language for official purposes; and multilingual, as when they fight within the European institutions for the rights of five official languages, including French. In the rest of la francophonie, policy has two separate emphases, one on multilateral cooperation and the other on bilateral measures. The contradiction between multilateral and bilateral co-operation is most marked in Francophone Africa. French is promoted by many means, from the development of schools and the media, to teacher training and textbook production. However, if ensuring development is the priority–as in recent years–then it is necessary to ask whether the transmission of knowledge and expertise should be done with or without French. Despite powerful processes of linguistic homogenisation, today there are still hundreds of different ethnic groups in Africa, each with its own language. The total number of speakers of Tamazight (Berber) in North Africa, for example, is over 30 million, which is about 8% of the Francophone African population. Some groups have only a few hundred members, others may run into the millions, such as the Rifi and Kabyles. In most North African countries, these ethnic groups are considered ‘national minorities’, though they are usually concentrated in certain areas where they mostly constitute a local or regional majority. In Algeria, for example, there are different Amazigh groupings that altogether represent more than 30% of the national population. They are mainly concentrated in the north and east of the country, while in the south Amazigh groups, such as the Twareg and the Mzab, represent a majority of the population, particularly in the rural areas. The rest of the country’s population may be classified as ‘Arabic’ speakers, or culturally and racially mixed. There are many areas of Africa marked by ongoing cultural confusion or conflict, and the continent has experienced a number of cultural invasions, which have had particularly significant consequences in the

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field of language. Arabic has had a massive impact on Africa, both as a medium of worship and as a source of loan words for indigenous African languages. Taken as a whole, Africa is home to more speakers of the Arabic language than any other tongue, either indigenous or alien. But the native speakers of Arabic are overwhelmingly in the north of the continent. The impact of Arabic as a medium of communication south of the Sahara has been indirect, in the form of loan words adopted by languages like Hausa, Kiswahili, Wolof and Somali. Some of these deeply Arabised indigenous languages have in turn influenced neighbouring languages. Arabic finds itself in competition with French in many areas. This is well illustrated by the debates about choice of alphabet. For instance, the latest scholarship (e.g. Bamgbose, 1991; Ntahombaye, 1989) tends to support the use of the Roman alphabet for written Tamazight (Berber), while for centuries Kiswahili was written using a modified version of the Arabic alphabet. However, following the arrival of the French in Africa, the Roman alphabet began to gain ascendancy (Akinnaso & Ogunbiyi, 1990; Parkin, 1994), coming to be used widely for written Kiswahili, and more and more African languages have adopted the Roman alphabet (Maw & Parkin, 1985). Should all of Africa’s countries then be characterised as made up of ‘linguistic minorities’? Such a definition of minority may even include dominant elites that, despite being tiny in number, happen to wield power and control resources that are not available to the subordinate, but majority, group of the population. This has been the case, for example, in South Africa (Kamwangamalu, 2001). Only a small percentage of the total population of North Africa can claim standard Arabic as their first language and French is the first language of only a small percentage of the total population of sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, yet it is the small elite groups that promote these languages who are the most privileged and powerful sections of these societies. ‘National’ and ‘minority’ languages are terms which reflect the process by which we deal cognitively with the sociocultural reality of francophone societies and thus tend to differ in their extensional and intentional meanings across those societies. Also, defining criteria for these terms drawn under the pressure of monolingual experience would show a poor understanding of their multilingual ethos. We know that there is a resurgence of ethnic-minority nationalism in many countries of the world, and minorities or indigenous populations not necessarily in minority have given up their passive existence and are showing signs of militant assertion. While this kind of resurgence is leading to ‘retribalisation’ in the interest of decentralisation in some cases in the West and Europe

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(Anderson, 1981), in Africa it is coming into conflict with the process of ‘detribalisation’ as a prerequisite for national unity. The distinction between ‘national’, ‘nationality’, and ‘minority’ languages should be seen in the wider perspective of their assigned roles in the overall communication setting and central educational policy of most postcolonial countries. In fact, as already discussed above, education authorities try to encapsulate the notion of language continuum in the two-language formula which suggests that while French and/or Arabic should be used in secondary and primary education, ‘minority languages’ or other major nationality language may be used in primary education. Providing a written script to non-literate languages is posing challenges to language planners and linguists. Although there are many orthographic systems, there are only a few major script systems that are commonly used in Africa. Christian missionaries promoted the cause of Roman scripts and Muslims that of Arabic scripts; the general trend has also been that some linguistic minorities opted for the script system employed by the dominant language speakers. The Berber language is written in three distinct script systems, Latin, Arabic, and Hamito-Semitic. With Berber populations and African ethnic minorities becoming more active in their resistance to majority group domination, we find a distinct change in the trend. Linguistic ‘minorities’ which are in search of their own great tradition do not find acceptable the use of the script system employed by the dominant superordinates; a drive which has led to cultural disintegration and not consolidation. Consequently, there is a strong movement by the members of such groups to identify their own indigenous script system with their ethnic identity. Supporters of the Berber cultural movement, for example, are also promoters of Tifinagh script, better known as old script. However, despite the progress made in the spread of African languages (Fardon & Furniss, 1994) through various means including the educational system, it is evident that there are large segments of the countries of Africa where students in school are not being trained in their respective languages. The role of French as an all-Francophone-Africa langue véhiculaire, universally known among the school educated population, would thus seem to be largely a prospective if not destined one.

New Visions of Francophonie Since the 1980s a new vision of francophonie has emerged centred around the concept of dialogue des cultures. Until the 1970s the term francophonie tended to imply a language policy based on domination

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and full of ambiguities. Indirectly associated with the work that has been done at the university level on the diversity of regional varieties of French, the dialogue des cultures is also a recognition of specific, diversified modes of expression, while at the same time making explicit the existence of other systems of references. In fact, the impetus for the work in this direction has come less from the universities than from institutions like the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and its various agencies. As far as the objectives assigned to the spread of French are concerned, a watershed has been reached: the language is no longer presented explicitly as a linguistic instrument that will guarantee ethnic cohesion in Africa, for example. On the contrary, there is now an affirmation of the need to take account of cultural differences. The dialogue des cultures places an emphasis on the diversity of the Francophone world, and beyond that on the diversity of the French found in Metropolitan France. There are many different ways of being Francophone, and the complexity and mobility of the situations people find themselves in undermine attempts to make generalisations in this field. However, some principles related to the notion of the dialogue des cultures can be questioned. Apart from the awkwardness of the phrase itself—cultures do not engage in dialogue with each other except through the actions of individuals who mediate between them—one could just as well examine the nature of the media defined as culturally representative. Works of literature and cinema in French are means of expression that only reflect the experience of a minority in many countries. The potential audience for literary texts is limited to the extent that literacy is a precondition for access to them. It is difficult to overcome the barriers preventing wider access to the distribution channels used for these types of production. Literature may possibly help people to express themselves if it is not approached in an idealistic way, but with an understanding of strategies, tactics, and the hegemony of which the problems of publishing and distribution are just the most readily apparent material aspects. The organisations of the Francophone world mentioned above do make efforts in this respect, but the impact of their work remains limited in view of the distribution systems controlled by the intellectual elites of the major Western capitals. The power of these systems affects the cultural minorities that come into contact with dominant Western cultures. One is reminded of the Quebec writer Michel Tremblé, speaking on the literary programme, Approches, broadcast by Antenne 2 in November 1981,who said ‘We are the first generation not to be writing for Paris’. Book distribution in Francophone Africa, for example, has been described as ‘colonisation bibliographique’ (Estivals, 1980). With regard to French literature textbooks for schools, it

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is noticeable that Francophone texts occupy a relatively small amount of space compared to the rest of the school’s selections, which are essentially French. The teaching approach suggested for these Francophone texts is in general highly debatable. Believing that they are taking account of cultural differences, the authors of the textbooks select extracts that have no particular literary distinction except as descriptions of the exotic. Alterity is reduced to its spectacular aspects. Considered as a folklore object, the foreign reality appears to have no relation to the immediate experiences of the learners. Sometimes the textbook authors also blur cultural differences by placing an emphasis on the universality of human nature. The underlying attitude constitutes an enlightened humanism that does not encourage approaches to these texts different in nature from those taken towards literature rooted in French culture. The application of these approaches may lead to a form of deculturation. If this is accepted as dialogue between cultures, there is a risk of underestimating the magnitude of the problems that this approach involves: linking the perception of difference exclusively to materials created for literary and artistic ends that promote an elitist concept of culture, and then neglecting the fact that the essential challenge is to comprehend cultural differences. An intercultural document is not a piece of information in itself; it is only significant for those who know how to construct and use a system of references situated in the same coherent cultural system as those who have conceived it. This cultural skill is not a given, but needs to be the object of specific training. The situations that are described and classified here are often envisaged in separate analytical frameworks, but all come under the banner of interculturalism. The divisions involved are not necessarily those of nationality and frontiers. The oppositions between dominant/dominated and elitist/popular cultures within a single country are highly pertinent to any account of intercultural problems. The situations experienced within the school system are a source of experience in the construction of intercultural skills. The development of relations between France and other Francophone countries offers an opportunity to question teaching methods by exploring the contacts that these activities permit to be established with Francophones, the French language as it is used by Francophones, and the realities of the Francophone world.

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Notes 1 This paper is a short version of my article, titled "The colonial legacy of French and subsequent postcolonial policy", which has appeared in the European Journal of Language Policy 5.2 (2013), 187-224. 2 Mazrui (1967:7) says that ‘Africa is landed with the consequences of the consensus of others’. 3 As the first national language, Wolof is very popular and plays an important role in everyday life. Although official documents and policies are produced in French, information also needs to be conveyed to the population in a language that they easily understand. So many public debates are held in Wolof. Private radio stations broadcast up to 70% of their programmes in Wolof. Senegal now has a Ministry of Basic Education and National Languages. 4 The leaders of the five countries of North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania) obviously consider this region of Africa an extension of the eastern Arab peninsula since they have decided to call it the Maghreb arabe for purely political and strategic reasons. 5 There are now more national television channels broadcasting in French, and more French-language daily and weekly newspapers. Newspapers, literature, and media production in French has increased, and the region’s leaders frequently give speeches in French. 6 By the end of the 1960s there had been over 25 successful coups on the continent, and by 1985, 131 attempted coups had taken place, of which 60% were successful. See Schraeder (2000).

References Aitsiselmi, F. (2002) Language planning in Algeria: Linguistic and cultural conflicts. In K. Salhi (ed.) French in and out of France: Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogue. Bern/New York: Peter Lang. Akinnaso, F.N. and Ogunbiyi, I.A. (1990) The place of Arabic in language planning in Nigeria. Language Problems and Language Planning 14 (1), 1–20. Anderson, A.B. (1981) The problem of minority languages. Language Problems and Language Planning 5 (3), 291–304. Bamgbose, A. (1991) Language and the Nation: The Language Question in Sub-Saharan Africa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Benrabah, M. (1999) Langue et Pouvoir en Algérie [Language and Power in Algeria]. Paris: Séguier. Language Imperatives in the Francophone World 343

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Boukous, A. (1999) Dominance et Différence: Essai sur les Enjeux Symboliques au Maroc [Dominance and Difference: An Essay on the Symbolic Stakes in Morocco]. Casablanca: Editions Le Fennec. Calvet, L.-J. (1974) Linguistique et Colonialisme: Petit Traité de Glottophagie [Linguistics and Colonialism: A Short Treatise on Glottophagy]. Paris: Payot. Charles-Roux, F. (1939) France et Chrétiens d’Orient [France and Eastern Christians]. Paris: Flammarion. Chauma, M., Chimombo, M. and Mtenje, A. (1997) Problems and prospects for the introduction of vernacular languages in primary education: TheMalawi experience. In B. Smieja (ed.) Proceedings of the LICCA Workshop in Dar es Salaam. Duisburg: Gerhard-MercatorUniversität. Crowder, M. (1962) Senegal: A Study of French Assimilation Policy. Oxford: OUP. Daoud, M. (2001) The language situation in Tunisia. Current Issues in Language Planning 2 (1), 1–52. Djité, P. (2000) Language planning in Côte d’Ivoire. Current Issues in Language Planning 1 (1), 11–46. Dumont, P. and Maurer, B. (1995) Sociolinguistique du Français en Afrique Francophone [The Sociolinguistics of French in Francophone Africa]. Vanves: EDICEF. Estivals, R. (1980) Le livre en Afrique noire francophone. Communicationet Langage, 46–57. Fardon, R. and Furniss, G. (eds) (1994) African Languages, Development and the State. London and New York: Routledge. Gill, H. (1999) Language choice, language policy and the tradition– modernity debate in culturally mixed postcolonial communities: France and the francophone Maghreb as a case study. In Y. Suleiman (ed.) Language and Society in the Middle East and North Africa. Richmond: Curzon Press. Kamwangamalu, N.M. (2001) The language planning situation in South Africa. Current Issues in Language Planning 2 (4), 361–445. Kayambazinthu, E. (1998) The language planning situation in Malawi. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 19 (5&6), 369–439. Laitin, D. (1992) Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa. Cambridge: CUP. Lyons, M. (1991) Regionalism and linguistic conformity in the French Revolution. In A. Forrest and P. Jones (eds) Reshaping France: Town, Country and Region during the French Revolution. Manchester, Manchester University Press.

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Manessy, G. (1994) Le Français en Afrique Noire: Mythe, Stratégies, Pratiques [French in Black Africa: Myth, Strategies and Practices]. Paris; L’Harmattan. Mansour, G. (1980) The dynamics of multilingualism: The case of Senegal. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 1 (4), 273–93. Marley, D. (2002) Diversity and uniformity: Linguistic fact and fiction in Morocco. In K. Salhi (ed.) French in and out of France: Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogue. Bern/New York: Peter Lang. Masagara, N. (1997) Negotiating the truth through oath forms. Journal ofMultilingual and Multicultural Development 18 (5), 385–401. Maw, J. and D. Parkin (eds) (1985) Swahili Language and Society. Vienna: Institut fur Afrikanistik und Agyptologie der Universitat Wien. Mazrui, A.A. (1967) On Heroes and Uhuru Worship. London: Longman. Ntahombaye, P. (ed.) (1989) L’Enseignement des Langues Nationales et du Français en Afrique Francophone: Expérience du Burundi [The Teaching of the National Languages and French in Francophone Africa: The Experience of Burundi]. Bujumbura: ANADIL. Ouerdan, A. (1993) La Question Berbère (1926–1980) [The Berber Question (1926–1980)]. Algiers: Epigraph/Dar el Ijtihad. Parkin, D (1994) Language, government and the play on purity and impurity: Arabic, Swahili and the vernaculars in Kenya. In R. Fardon and G. Furniss (eds) African Languages, Development and the State. London and New York: Routledge. Salhi, K. (2002). MCB (Berber Cultural Movement). In M. A. Majumdar Francophone Studies. London: Arnold. Sayah, M. (2002). Linguistic issues and policies in Tunisia. In K. Salhi (ed.) French in and out of France: Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogue. Bern/New York: Peter Lang. Schraeder, P. J. (2000) African Politics and Society: A Mosaic in Transformation. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Suleiman, Y. (1994) Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives. Richmond: Curzon Press. Thompson, A. (2000) An Introduction to African Politics. London: Routledge. Wardhaugh, R. (1987). Languages in Competition: Dominance, Diversity and Decline. London: Blackwell. Wauthier, C. (1995) Quatre Présidents et l’Afrique: De Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterand: Quarante ans de Politique Africaine

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[Four Presidents and Africa. De Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterand: Forty Years of African Politics]. Paris: Seuil. Williams, M. (1989) Looking sideways: English studies, tradition and cross-cultural comparisions. SPAN 28, 26–27.

CHAPTER NINETEEN FRANCOPHONE IDENTITIES BETWEEN “TOUT-MONDE” AND “MONDE” SERVANNE WOODWARD UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO

The specific nature of identity theories for Francophone literatures falls apart upon examination. On the one hand, national borders are respected to identify a given group of authors in regards to “national literature,” raising the question of deciding whether we are dealing with national writers as opposed to immigrant writers (first, second generation), writers more or less settled in permanent migration, or an indigenous author belonging to the majority or minorities of the country; on the other hand, we should search for generic pioneering or personal innovations to detect an identifying characteristic for a body of writings or to affirm a unique signature. Thus Maryse Condé, a writer of Caribbean descent living in the United States after multiple journeys, cannot relate to French language the way Frankétienne does, because he is a Haitian author living in Haiti, and he assumed a two-sided identity, at least, when he considered the American father who left him to the care of his Haitian mother. Maryse Condé refuses to identify herself either by language or by nationality (“I like to repeat that I write neither in French nor in Creole, but in Maryse Condé.” Condé 2007: 205). A quick observation of her writing leads us to the conclusion that she uses “standard” French rather than Creole from an Anglophone surrounding, while Frankétienne writes in Creole and in French, both practiced in his homeland, and having turned his back on English, the language of his father. The question of authorial identity devolves into private and intimate issues: the autobiographical account of the author’s coming to writing, and above all the imaginary identity that we all build for ourselves. Therefore identity fluctuates from the singular to the national, even to the universal. Identity can be understood as an internal feeling or a legal fact sometimes completely external to the

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individual’s feeling or will; one can be independent of the other and involve distinctions between nationality and citizenship. The situations of “stateless” persons must be considered, such as those of the “Jews” under the Vichy government. Referring to self-representations provided by outsiders to those who are expected to endorse it, Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon spoke of alienating identities intended for the colonized and crafted by the colonizer, identities that the colonized adopt or reject. At least at the level of the imaginary, writers participate in a community like a “republic of letters” independent from historical borders, its members coming from all places and all languages. Following the concept of Etienne Balibar of “fictitious ethnicity,” Christiane Albert thinks that elaborated by Herder against “the French universalist literary perspective,” the European nationalist model posited “a ‘natural’ equation between a given language and a nation that found its expression through a national cultural legacy safekeeping the ‘soul’ of a population” (Albert 2005: 159; Balibar 1988: 130-31). Over the past thirty years, cultural identity has favored the geographical model, whereby an entire continent becomes a source of identity, such as Africa in the literary fields of the “African Diaspora.” Thus sub-Saharan and Caribbean Francophone studies have traditionally been linked, independently of the precise genealogy or place of residence of the “Caribbean” or “African” authors. Chosen or forced migrations over different periods have given rise to tenuous homeland harmony among ethnic groups either gathered together under the banners of independent African border-states, or variously marooned along the strategic trade points of the Caribbean islands among other places. The pluringualism of the colonies and the principle of multicultural cohabitation that was the colonial order of the day becomes one of the greater dimensions of colonizing countries as a result of the rapid spike in contemporary immigration, orchestrated in large part by the global capitalist economy. In Quebec, Régine Robin and Simon Harel are among those who participated in developing reflections on “migrant” writing by taking into account the minority situation of the authors and their relation to the cultural “center” of the society they are integrating. Obviously, the place reserved for foreigners immigrating in France is different from that of Quebec because—forgetting the aboriginal minorities—Canada characterizes itself as a country of immigrants derived from its two “founding” communities, English and French. Economic operation of these communities seems to require massive immigration from many parts of the globe, naturalized by the “mosaic” ideology—the respect of all differences of the communities integrated into the nation. In the case of

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contemporary nations receptive to immigration, newcomers experience a hybrid linguistic identity unevenly balanced between two or several languages. Apart from the unavoidable culture shock, ideas of nationality and citizenship covered by shared laws cause some confusion from one jurisdiction to another. These ideas are accompanied by a sense of belonging, or group membership, ethnic, cultural, nationalist, mythical, historical, and perhaps competing with universal human membership (or other versions of universalism). The multiple nuances of inclusion and exclusion seem infinite and vary significantly in micro-situations and from one country to another. They are linked to questions raised by “identity” (as identical to oneself or to others) and distinctions of the one amongst others, as opposed to all others, several others, one “Other,” etc... Theorists shy away from homogeneous totalizing group visions, and from the absolute isolation of each autistic author detached in a bubble of uprooted signature-language. Thus, Gary Victor repudiates the idea of a national literature in “Littérature-monde ou liberté d’être” (“I do not know what a world literature is. I do not know either what French, American, or Haitian literatures are. The attribution of a nationality to creation fossilizes it, and excludes it from other places” (Victor 2007: 315)). Hence literary identity hesitates between a universal and a “migrant” model, finding its way between two extremes: an unanchored autonomy, radiant and communicative, or a retractable self-sufficiency, with no addressee, only the margins of the marginalized. In all circumstances, however, literary autonomy is relative as it intends to be unifying, to bring people together, if the author is counting on a readership, and as well if we consider that one’s writing is preceded by the context of genre determining how the work will be received, distributed, and classified. Still, immigrant authors are faced with one particular expectation from their readership (an expectation which they are free to take into account or not): that they will express a supplemental perspective, a relation to the world setting them apart from native-born writers. The originality of a “migrant” author would be a revealing vision dependent on bifocal, bicultural superposition implementing a new style of writing which modifies how one relates to the world. Literary critics are accustomed to manifestos, to the renewal of theory, and they ask of Francophone writers a critical and analytical, if not political and ideological outlook, particularly in their linguistic choices, especially if they are immigrants or if their first language is not French. Given that all novelists are not theorists and ideologues, however, this required standpoint from every writer may become an exorbitant demand. Moreover, the identical “choice” of French may reveal only superficial

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sameness. Like Senghor, Nancy Huston adopted French as language of publication. This linguistic choice does not have the same resonance coming from an author who inherited his French through colonization no less, as from a motivation of pure Francophilia. Notwithstanding, LéonFrançois Hoffman considers that in Haiti, where English is now a majority language, the use of French does appear to be entirely a free choice (Hoffman 1999: 58). Indeed the language of authorship should not be automatically locked on mother tongue and birthplaces. Abdourahmane A. Waberi denounces the narrow mindedness of those who take too great an interest in the personal background of authors. Waberi regrets that in view of her Vietnamese origins, Anna Moï is confined to the misleading label of “Francophone” while she should be considered a “French writer” since she writes “in the same language as Philippe Sollers, Amélie Nothomb” (Waberi 2007: 68-69). Let us also acknowledge that some authors have benefited from listing their international background in their biographies. This is the case for Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, from Nice (France) and Mauritius. The foreign “origins” of the author is intriguing to readers curious about this special feature. More than hallmarks of genre, or an author’s standpoint, this is a marketing strategy at work. Many readers are doubtless eager to travel by proxy, whether this is to be accomplished through travel literature or through “Francophone” works, local color, “been to,” etc. These considerations should indicate that one cannot rely on the readership targeted by the book trade to determine literary genres. Some authors of former French or Belgian colonies reject “francophone” labels even though official channels of “francophonie” gave them a platform for their career. Sony Labou Tansi was launched in French festivals reserved for “Francophone” writers, the “Francofffonies” inaugurated under President Giscard d’Estaing. However, Sony Labou Tansi refuses the “African” identity of his writing: “Pas d’Afrique s’il vous plait" (“No Africa please” (Tansi 1981: 5)), he requests in the prologue of his play “La parenthèse de sang” (“The Parenthesis of Blood”). This position does not prevent him from using French words typically used in Africa (“radio-trottoir”; radio-sidewalk), or titles such as “guide du peuple” (guide of the people) and “guide providentiel” (providential guide) evoking political figures of Congo-Zaïre. Initially, we can conclude that the readership or theoretical framework of reading addressed by the author is not necessarily the one envisaged by publishers and promoters and that these approaches and marketing can find an unexpected clientele. In the case of Sony Labou Tansi (Marel Sony or Ntsoni), his approach is decisively global; his thematic content does not highlight national identity or geographical markers; he writes in French on

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the crest of a repressed or regurgitated colonization (“I did not have recourse to French; French had recourse to me”; Tansi 1986: 14). The use of French permeable to African languages reflects a reversal of origins. French is thus sui generi [self-generated], from the author’s language to an audience predestined to receive French as a language restituted to itself with traces of heterogeneous elements indicative of its invasions on colonized lands. The “Francophone” response is presented as an initiative that had been sollicited or as a reactive reflex, automatically admissible or inadmissible, depending on the audience who shares the French language. In its “Call for Papers” section, the International Journal of Francophone Studies defines Francophonie as “a living speech community and network of economic relations which spans the globe but exists within the context of the global dominance of English. ‘Francophone studies’ can be said to address a double ‘minority’, in that it is concerned with the indigenous cultures and languages that the French Empire attempted to supplant and then assimilate.” What would remain specific to pluralistic Francophonies would be the de-centering of French in relation to its “original” colonial historical linguistic focus; “origins” which today correspond to the cultural capitals within the Belgian and French borders for ex-colonies. Francophone identity would designate the other French, or the same as French, yet divided by this comparison with(in) French, depending on one’s emphasis on similarities or the specific linguistic traits of each individual, from one area or another, both outside and inside borders. Francophone identity also depends on whether one is looking at a land where colonization was established more or less recently (in Canada for example), or considering emancipated countries whose borders are now sovereign and independent (in Senegal for example). Currently, Canadian interests in literatures of authors from recent continental immigration gives rise to a reflection on “migrant” literature, and the literature of former French colonists is classified as French, or more recently “of French expression,” whether from Quebec or Acadia and wherein indigenous authors (First Nation) constitute a subgroup. “Francophonie” can find a place with Franco-Ontarians out of bias towards the majority “Anglophone” community. In France, it is instead authors who are immigrants or residing in the former colonies who most often are labeled as “Francophone” rather than “migrant.” According to other points of view, however, all French expression is Francophone, including diverse varieties of French and French from France (this is the position held by the academic association of the International Council of Francophone Studies—the CIEF—among others). In other words, the qualifier “Francophone” includes French from France as a specific

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linguistic feature, or “French” includes all forms of linguistic expressions; otherwise the “Francophone” label would be the fossilized sign of a colonial mentality proceeding by exclusion, and sorting out foreign authors from the national literary pantheon without regard to the form of language used (this is the point of view of “World Literature,” which would like to make “Francophone” and “Francophonie” obsolete). The flexibility of literary canons, and incidentally the different states of the French language remain a question.

The “Tout-Monde” One of the most attractive ideas regarding Francophone literary identity in recent years comes from Edouard Glissant: according to him, the writer today, unilingual or not, holds other languages in mind. Now, a global consciousness reworks literary languages (Glissant 2010: 14, 28; Gauvin 1999: 17). It is true that French Renaissance authors kept Latin in view as they wrote in a language barely weaned from then-venerated models of Antiquity; in a language striated with the structural and etymological memory of Latin. Today, according to Glissant, it would be less a question of the awareness of the archaeological foundations of source languages, but rather the synchronous awareness of the alterity and diversity of languages, even languages unknown to the author, that would inhabit the writer of any language. This does not prevent Glissant from setting the poetics of creolity against the structure of the French language, the latter acting as the dead language of Creole (Glissant 2010: 21). It is not necessary to note that Glissant’s writing is more French than Creole because he emphasizes the unformulated overtones of languages in their imaginary resonances. Glissant speaks about an audience of the future “of infinite variation of linguistic sensibilities” (Glissant 2010: 21). Once again, these sensitivities do not necessarily affect the form of the particular language borrowed for writing. Therefore he applauds the fact that languages “contaminate” one another at the level of the imaginary, while simple borrowings from one language to another seem inconsequential to him (Glissant 2010: 112). The impetus of “Tout-Monde” optimistically pursues relationship with unforeseeable results, immediate and future, in its linguistic echoes, but always in relation to the global imaginary, and with the awareness of humanity in the diversity of its linguistic heritage in the mind of authors. Pressed by Lise Gauvain to respond to the possibility that diversity might do away with the idea of the nation, Glissant apparently changes the subject and calls for the reaffirmation of “identities … one of the conquests of modern times…,” and a national or regional

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resurgence of “the poetics of sharing in the Tout-monde”; one of these bodies would be constituted by “le Parlement international des écrivains” (“the international Parliament of writers”;1 Glissant 2010: 39, 49). Here national and international politics intervene by offering recourse to alternative spaces protected by very traditional and well-guarded borders (police, armies), and asylum to dissident authors (citizens of letters) at risk of imprisonment in their countries for having expressed themselves in ways that displeased their governments. The generous embrace of the entire world in linguistic and cultural diversity operates on a rough terrain of politics, history and present-day realities, where national borders function as areas of persecution, of censorship, or on the contrary, as possible lands of asylum. Certainly literary universals provide a hospitable cosmopolitan alternative, when one is faced with the fragile contingency of intra- and international relations. Literature emerges from all languages and all countries. Instead of national-linguistic borders, one could just as well envision applying geographical identities, insular or continental, to literatures. Thus in January 2009, Ralph Bauer considers that Glissant’s thought influenced the development of “hemispheric studies” around 1990, with creolity becoming the nodal condition of the American continent and a microcosm of the hybrid culture of the “American” hemisphere (Bauer 2009: 242-43).2 Hemispheric studies tend to do away with previous comparative studies based on non-homogeneous cultural and linguistic areas to “discover” the global cultural essence of the American continent (North and South combined; all languages combined) (Bauer 2009: 24243). This calls for a synthesis of cultures. Bauer mentions two political issues connected to this sort of collegial coalescence which sets aside historical, linguistic, cultural, and border differences. He first refers to Walter Mignolo, who explains that Louis Napoleon launched the idea of “Latin America” taken as a unit with the goal of minimizing the recently independent nations of South America, in order to undercut their sovereignty, and justify, for example, the French presence in Mexico (Bauer 2009: 236). Next, he observes that the concepts of border elimination and deterritorialization appeared unexpectedly in a context in which the First Nations (of both South and North America) were fighting for recognition of their right to sovereignty, undermined up to now, and territorial rights, rights better supported by stable concepts of the State and of identity tied to the land (Bauer 2009: 238; referring to Andrews and Walton 2006: 600-10). Similarly, Quebec managed to be recognized as a “nation” within Canada on November 27, 2006, in the House of

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Commons. Activists for decolonization were working against generalized geographical-hemispheric grouping. Glissant himself seems to have more trust in the power of resistance of creolity in the face of cultural globalization. In his interview with Lise Gauvin, he posits Creole identity as both the ideal of a globally cosmopolitan horizon, and as a particularity of “archepelagic” thinking (Glissant 2010: 66), while he theorizes, continents are naturally becoming unilingual. Citing the case of Brittany (a region in France), he assumes that the Breton language and its imaginary will disappear because its practioners lack the protection of the archipelago’s island borders (Glissant 2010: 112). On the difficulty of defining postcolonial Francophonies, disengaging them from the colonizer-colonized relationship, and making the French language self-sufficient with respect to standard French, Glissant suggests something different: “to know what Francophonie does accomplish in the world” (Glissant 2010: 101). It is entirely possible that he is alluding to governmental Francophonie, such as that of the International Organization of Francophonie (the O.I.F.), with its economic and democratic mandates. From a literary-linguistic point of view, however, Glissant might designate the relation of language to the world as an action, a “doing,” with language controlling the world, memory, and a possible opening-out. Glissant tends to dissociate himself from historical hierarchies, grudges, and revenge in relation to French colonization, French language and culture. He is not suggesting that history be forgotten, but that it be transcended, through an accelerated relationship between equals within the community of writers, using the language of solidarity (any language) within a world in the making—a message which in the final analysis is very close to Senghor. The vision of the “Tout-monde,” which offers the poetics of the future as policy, remains appealing. Although it does not claim to resolve its contradictions about place and universal identities, the identities of individual “we’s,” or of a community “I”, it evokes interrelations that are not yet defined, a poetics of “monde incréé” [uncreated world], within which identity oscillates between ever-changing singular and plural in a world that remains a potential to define. Many of the instances of unresolved chiasmus of “Tout-monde” literary thought on issues of identity depend on Formalist linguistic theoretical concepts which are still in development in the wake of structuralism. In this context, the journal Esprit re-edited their May 1967 issue, which contains two articles summarizing the divergence of views underlying identity in its relation to language. The first article, “Le système et la personne” by Jean-Marie Domenach identifies the

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“musketeers” of Structuralism: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Lévi-Strauss defines meaning as a combination of elements, Lacan and Foucault as a system and a set of relationships, leaving out the subjective and the personal, but also history. The rejection of history would have originated in the disappointment of an intellectual Left seeking the truth of humanity in an anti-historical ethnology: “shall we go farther and see a political ideology expressing the rise of technocracy and bourgeois interest in consolidating the [political] system promoted by structuralism.” (Domenach 1967: 771). For Domenach, this conjecture reinforced the political status quo from the 1950s to the 1970s, more or less to the benefit of the bourgeoisie (of which the intellectuals were a part), humanists and linguists. This rationalized their loss of a sense of responsibility in relation to governments and those who determine the destiny of populations and the world: “That I am not in what I say, and I am not where I think I am, as Foucault and Lacan declare” (Domenach 1967: 778). It is an era of withdrawal between being and language, between language and cognitive thought. This modifies the Cartesian cogito. The consciousness of being is expropriated: it is a wrinkle, an iridescence, a function of linguistic texture. In the second article of this issue, Paul Ricoeur returns to the Saussurian distinction between langue (an abstract system, virtual and thus ahistorical, a form, not a substance), and parole: speech-acts, “scattered in the records of psycho-physiology, psychology, sociology” (Ricoeur 1967: 803). Ricoeur objects to the emphasis on the virtual immateriality of language itself, subjects spoken without an object other than language itself, referring to its system as “a foreclosure of language”: “The units of meaning we gather through analysis mean nothing: they are mere potentials for combination; they say nothing: they only assemble and dissemble” (Ricoeur 1967: 821). As we have seen, Glissant places creolity in the virtual linguistic space of the global and future “Tout-monde.” However, he insists on the impact of the word (the literary word as well) on territorial space and vice versa, on the creation of corridors hospitable to writers, and he is doubtlessly correct in examining the importance of the power of the imaginary in the modus operandi of “Tout-monde.”

… to “World literature” In 2007, 40 signatories from among the greatest contemporary writers published a manifesto of “World Literature.” This manifesto was expertly analyzed by numerous critics who in general were fairly disappointed about its contents—for instance, a death sentence imposed on la

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Francophonie—leaving a possible opening for Francophonies. Jean Rouaud and Michel le Bris published at the same time a more developed volume attempting to define “World Literature.” In his introduction, Jean Rouaud declares that he is “fed up” with the French novel coming out of linguistic structuralism, and astonished that two wars, collaboration and other historical blunders has had no effect on French novelists: “If after text there is more text, it was but the worst type of blindness for the one who refuses to see” (Rouaud 2007: 15). Michel Le Bris refers to the objections of a repentant Formalist, Tzvetan Todorov, who in his 2006 book ( La littérature en péril) considered that in France, the linguistic aporia of French literature endangered literature because it consummated a divorce from referential identity and the world (Le Bris 2007: 300). The referential atrophy of literature is challenged. In the theoretical field, discord had arisen from the linguistic foundations of literary structuralism. Thus Ricoeur wished to re-establish the concept of discourse as a medium, unifying the “langue” and “parole” which Saussure had divided: “it is the medium, the condition surrounding and enabling the subject to take a stance and perceive the world as it takes shape” (Ricoeur 1967: 812). Ricoeur adds that if “language has noone and is noone” at any rate, “the subjectivity of the speech act is immediately an intersubjective address” (Ricoeur 1967: 810). Subjective referents, pronouns and nouns, the demonstrative, what appears in your sight, and thus one’s control of the world and of thought are not side-stepped in the outlook of Ricoeur, who admits his involvement in the communicative concept of “discourse,” understood in Benveniste’s sense of the term, in which proper nouns and personal pronouns take precedence. Lastly, an excessively Saussurian structuralist linguistic concept might be opposed to “doing” and to the involvement of language in effective and active control between beings, their imaginaries, and the world as an objective dimension. Le Bris also denounces a sterile literary scene (“the novel, dedicated to eternal selfreference, forfeiting meaning, subject, and history from the start”; Le Bris 2007: 25). The subject cannot be extracted from sociological and linguistic identity, and as part of the flow of collective history. Consequently, identity surpasses the subjective as a subject pronoun of the linguistic fabric. Self-awareness is achieved through the community and its history. Pour une littérature-monde (For a World literature) again includes Glissant, as part of the cultural decolonization of all areas even slightly Francophone. He first evokes, within a poetics of the landscape, a space which involves the relation between colonized and colonizer (Glissant 2007: 78). He then presents “subversive” struggles between minority and majority languages in a context of politico-economic domination (Glissant

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2007: 80-81). The linguistic issue is territoriality. It is a question of membership in this resistance and identity, and therefore of political, not of individual, autonomy. For example, in the 1980s, the Seychelles tried the linguistic experience of disallowing the French and English used in the archipelago, due to the French protectorate and the British colonization that followed it, and established Creole as the official language of instruction from clearly ideological motives. France had duly satisfied this (paradoxical) request for technical assistance to set up classroom pedagogies entirely in Creole. Thirty years later, it is still too soon to see whether this experience will be positive, but for the moment a generation of the Seychelles population has lost its bi- and tri-lingualism, and its main population is now linguistically walled in. The linguistic and ideological dimension of the colonizer and the colonized depends on the place, and doubtless on one’s outlook as well as hindsight. In the detached view of the Amerindians of Canada, the struggles between “the two solitudes” would amount to fratricide committed between colonizers and their past military participations such as in the war of 1812 brought them no benefits.3 It is as a third party as well that Jacques Godbout compares US and French “colonialisms” from a Quebec perspective. And he regrets “francité”/Frenchness, a term which evokes a fraternal prism of French expressions, and which in his view would have been preferable to “Francophonie” which, he points out, rhymes with “colony” (Godbout 2007: 109). He criticizes the institutional response to Quebec writers in France, where the category of “world book” does not yet exist, as it does in North America, the arrival of which would financially support Frenchlanguage authors (Godbout 2007: 104). “World literature” would thus attempt to set up a distribution network equivalent to that of “World literatures” as a sales category on bookstore shelves. He calls for cosmopolitan access to broadcasting networks, allowing French-language authors to activate their full support of literary citizenship. Albert sees in the concept of “world literature” a commercial point of origin that is Anglophone: “The same way World Music tames musics from the South through a series of preestablished norms, in order to create a standardized product that may be addressed to multiple audiences, World Fiction wanted to summon a new literary cosmopolitism rid of national bounds” (Albert 2005: 162). The standardization of commercial criteria for universalist literary models might be cause for concern. Albert discerns in the success of creolity the neutralization of the political awareness of negritude by the benign discourse of “métissage” which serves “the very picture of exoticism: The ‘Antilles’, Marseilles-style” (Albert 1999: 256). According to Albert, creolity holds out the ever-challenging mythical

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portrait of the “noble savage” since Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1796) established an ideological construction for the advancement of modernity by avoiding conflict, at a time when France is facing immigration problems: regionalist literature had already fulfilled this mandate in France around 1930 by erasing the contribution of workers and the influx of petty bourgeoisie in the provinces, when these societal changes presented as many agents of conflict. In December 2008, Dominique Wolton had a similar idea to Albert: “In order to think about francophone identity, one must think about the future of such identities in the globalized world. In order to speak about identities living under one roof, a more demanding articulation than ‘métissage’ will have to be found, because the latter suggests that the question of cultural and political identity is no longer a problem. And it is very far from being the case when one witnesses the struggles and conflicts of globalization. In order to solve the question of identities today we must find the means of their joint tenancy, and probably the means to prevent the recurrence of violent irredentism of identity to contribute to peace” (Wolton 2998: 68). Albert considers that the benign pre-war vogue of regionalism ultimately promoted a literature prejudicial to authentic “elaborations of autonomous representations of specific identities” (Albert 1999: 257). She anticipates that, by analogy with the model of post-war regional literatures which ran out of steam, the current trend of creolity will last as long as the question of immigration in France remains a troublesome issue. Lilian Kesteloot agrees with her, at least on the level of linguistic experimentation. Kesteloot identified three possible trends in Francophone literatures, which included the maximum degree of Creolization or Africanization of French (Kourouma, Labou Tansi, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Gisèle Pineau): “the technique may become tiresome…it is our opinion that it will be used in exceptional cases” (Kesteloot 1999: 45). Kesteloot pointed out the limits of the hospitality given a language or a readership, referring to a book published by Belfond in 1989, Le désert inhumain (The Inhuman Desert) of Mamadou Koukouna, a text accompanied by a long glossary with a deterrent effect, if one can judge by its dismal sales and the fact that the work dropped out of critical view suddenly (Kesteloot 1999: 45). In 2013 it is difficult to anticipate what will follow, but this baroque linguistic effort might join the self-referential necrosis of opaque, introverted literature that exasperated Adamov, Todorov, Le Bris, and Rouaud. The pendulum may swing back to a more “classical” style. Decolonization and the affirmation of Francophone identity are not undertakings which require a baroque form of expression, neologisms created by authors or a style “between” two languages. Senghor and

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Césaire expressed themselves very clearly and quite effectively in crystalline French. Césaire even congratulated himself on having found in the French authors of the academic curriculum ideas which sparked his awareness of the injustice of French colonization. This is also the position of Henri Lopès, as reported by Pierre Soubias: “It is by means of a text written in French that my mental decolonization began” (Soubias 1999: 127). The two other possible trends according to Kesteloot are unilingual: writing in any foreign language, perhaps in French; writing in a transcribed African language using the French or Arabic alphabet. Thus, the decolonized Francophone writer writes in the full affirmation of an identity one might conceive independently from any form of French. Kesteloot cites the notable postcolonial authors who decided to write in an African language or in Creole (Kesteloot 1999: 46). The question of “Francophonie” as decolonization offers a linguistic and cultural diversity which can just as well occur in the total absence of the slightest trace of French. This is the point of view held by the O.I.F., whose intention is to defend cultures in their diversities with particular attention to endangered languages. Consequently, one of the poles of Francophonie would paradoxically be the erasure of the French language in the face of nationbuilding policies. Rachid Boujedra would not be “a special case in Francophone literature” because his books following his return to Algeria are in Arabic: “the Francophone public I had left in 1969 speaks mainly Arabic nowadays” (Prignitz 1999: 318). In the context of the former colonies, one must expect that certain authors will choose to write in their own language. It will always be possible to have them translated into other languages. In the context of academic teaching, “Francophonie” would lose authors whose more eminent figures might in future become the object of study in “Modern Languages” departments, and the Francophone authors presented in French Studies departments might increasingly become second-generation immigrants in French-speaking countries or provinces, rather than authors living in African countries. Myriam Suchet believes that “World” literature “is not so much the advent of literary Francophonie’s demise, as it is the crest of its rivalry with literatures born out of formerly colonized countries” (Suchet 2009: 20). As a parting word, let us observe that Francophonies are still mutating.

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Acknowledgement I would like to thank Daniel Brant, a Ph.D. student in French at the University of Illinois, and Yvette Smith, Ph.D., for their fine work in translating and editing this essay from French into English.

Notes 1

This Parliament actually existed between1993-2004. It aimed to protect writers indicted by their regimes. Two other organizations have since succeeded it. 2 Françoise Lionnet correctly identifies a surge toward the “creolization” of theory. 3 This last point is the cynical position of James Bartleman, who thinks that “past 1812, the Amerindians lost their usefulness to the ‘founding’ peoples of Canada (and of the United States)” and as soon they no longer served as a military phalanx that one could abandon on the battlefield in case of difficulty, the “First Nations” were stranded on bad lands to host their “reservations,” and turning them into “invisible” entities to the public—Bartleman alludes to the phenomenon denounced by Ralph Ellison in his famous novel, Invisible Man. Notes from the lecture by James Bartleman (27th Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, Trudeau Mentor, and Writer) “Canada’s Forgotten Native Children.”

References Albert, Christiane. L’immigration dans le roman francophone contemporain. Paris: Kartala, 2005. —. “Le discours de la créolité et celui du régionalisme français avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale: effets de mode et enjeux identitaires.” In Francophonies et identités culturelles. Directed by Christianne Albert. Paris: Karthala, 1999. 247-58. Andrews, Jennifer and Priscilla L. Walton. “Rethinking Canadian and American Nationality: Indigeneity and the 49th Parallel in Thomas King.” American Literary History 18 no 3 (2006): 600-17. Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, nation, classe. Les identités ambiguës. Paris: La Découverte, 1988. Bartleman, James. “Canada’s Forgotten Native Children.” Talk delivered at the University of Western Ontario campus, London, ON Canada, March 27, 2012. Bauer, Ralph. “Hemispheric studies.” Publications of the Modern Language Association. 124 no 1 (January 2009): 234-50. Condé, Maryse. “Liaison dangereuse.” In Pour une littérature-monde. Directed by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 205-16.

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Domenach, Jean-Marie. “Le système et la personne.” Esprit no 5 (Mai 1967): 771-80. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952; 2001. Gauvin, Lise. “Ecriture, surconscience et plurilinguisme: une poétique de l’errance.” In Francophonie et identités culturelles. Directed by Christianne Albert. Paris: Karthala, 1999. 5-29. Glissant, Edouard. “L’imaginaire des langues.” In Imaginaire des Langues. Entretiens avec Lise Gauvin (1991-2009). Paris: Gallimard, 2010. —. “Solitaire et solidaire. Entretien [de Philippe Artières] avec Edouard Glissant.” In Pour une littérature-monde. Directed by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 77-86. Godbout, Jacques. “La question préalable.” In Pour une littérature-monde. Directed by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 103-11. Hoffmann, Léon-François. « La langue française et le danger états-unien en Haïti. » In Francophonies et identités culturelles. Directed by Christianne Albert. Paris: Karthala, 1999. 49-58. Huston, Nancy. “Traduttore non è traditore.” In Pour une littératuremonde. Directed by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 151-60. Kesteloot, Lilian. “Négritude et créolité.” In Francophonies et identités culturelles. Directed by Christianne Albert. Paris: Karthala, 1999. 3948. Le Bris, Michel. “Pour une littérature-monde en français.” In Pour une littérature-monde. Directed by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 23-53. Lionnet, Françoise and Shumei Shi. The Creolization of Theory. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011. Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1957. Mignolo, Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Prignitz, Gisèle. “Table Ronde du 27 mai 1998, compte rendu.” In Francophonies et identités culturelles. Directed by Christianne Albert. Paris: Karthala, 1999. 317-28. Ricœur, Paul. “La structure, le mot, l’événement.” Esprit no 5 (Mai 1967): 801-21. Rouaud, Jean “Mort d’une certaine idée.” In Pour une littérature-monde. Directed by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 7-22.

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Soubias, Pierre. “Entre langue de l’autre et langue à soi.” In Francophonies et identités culturelles. Directed by Christianne Albert. Paris: Karthala, 1999. 119-135. Suchet, Myriam. “Entre la littérature postcoloniale et la ‘littérature-monde’ en français: un modèle pour l’énonciation francophone?” Edited by Mbaye Diouf et Olga Hél-Bongo. Société et énonciation dans le roman francophone, Recherche francophone no 3 (2009): 13-24. Tansi, Sony Labou. “La parenthèse de sang.” Paris: Hatier, 1981. —. “Un citoyen de ce siècle. Entretien recueilli par Bernard Magnier.” Equateur no 1 (1986): 12-20. Todorov, Tzvetan. La littérature en péril. Paris: Flammarion 2006. Victor, Gary. “Littérature-monde ou liberté d’être.” In Pour une littérature-monde. Directed by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 315-320. Waberi, Abdourahman A. “Ecrivains en position d’entraver.” In Pour une littérature-monde. Directed by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 67-75. Wolton, Dominique. “‘Rapport Wolton’ de la Cellule de Réflexion Stratégique de la Francophonie livres électroniques gratuits.” December 2008. December 2013. The section “call for papers” of the International journal of francophone studies, December 2013.

CHAPTER TWENTY ARE WE POST-FRANCOPHONE YET? (OR IS THE FUTURE OF FRANCOPHONIE BEHIND US?) LIA BROZGAL UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

In his 2000 essay titled “The Communist Manifesto and World Literature,” Aijaz Ahmad declared it “impossible to be a serious student of French literature without having to come to terms with literature composed in the language by Caribbean and North African writers” (Ahmad 2000: 13). The statement, which will resonate as a truism to many of those reading this volume, is nonetheless of interest on two levels: first, scholars of the literatures in question cannot help but revel in Ahmad’s declarative and self-evident tone regarding the importance of what might be called “Francophone” literature; indeed, for readers like myself, he is preaching to the choir. Second—and perhaps this is a logical result of the first—the phrase presents a certain tantalizing polysemic potential. Of course, when Ahmad writes “to come to terms” he certainly means “to recognize the existence of,” “to integrate,” or “to take into account” these other literatures in French; in the essay in question, after all, his point is not to make an argument about taxonomies of French-language literatures, but rather to suggest that Marx’s embrace of “world literature” (à la Goethe) was grounded in his own materialist philosophy (Ahmad 2000: 13). However, another level of meaning is revealed when we parse the expression “to come to terms” somewhat more literally as “to arrive at,” or “to find,” the actual terminology adequate to describe this particular corpus of writing. Rewriting Ahmad through such a literal filter, we might formulate a declaration such as this one: “today, it is impossible to be a serious student of French literature without engaging questions of nomenclature and taxonomy, without arriving at, or wrestling with, the

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very terms that allow us to talk about Caribbean and North African literature composed in the language.” The phenomenon Ahmed describes, that is, the emergence and recognition of Francophone literatures, has been hailed as one of the most important sea changes in the field of French Studies (MacDonald and Suleiman 2012: x). Notwithstanding his lucidity with respect to the importance of Francophone literature in the context of a broader, on-going scholarly conversation, it is impossible not to notice that Ahmad sidesteps the question of naming it as such, preferring instead a circumlocution (“literature composed in the language”) that remains blissfully unfreighted with the baggage of terminological debates.1 If Ahmad is able to tout “coming to terms” without actually having to come to (light upon) a term, it may be in part because he is working from a position of relative neutrality, outside of those departments and scholarly circles that both produce and witness regular bouts of “taxonomy fever.” The effects of the “Francophone turn” appear to have been salutary as new, or newly valorized, objects of study have provided the opportunity to break critical ground and had the effect of opening fields or of stimulating different ways of thinking in more inveterate areas of inquiry. The “turn,” however, has also brought with it myriad questions of institutional categorization and nomenclature, as scholars endeavor to situate these new objects of study, both institutionally and hermeneutically. The advent of francophonie within the academy appears to have carried within it an interrogation of its own legitimacy, for no sooner had French departments begun to rebrand themselves as “French and Francophone,” and job postings gone up for “francophonists” than the stability of the term was called into question. Among the many charges against “Francophone” as the adjective of choice to describe the literary production from the former colonies are its reliance on the centerperiphery dialectic and its subsequent reification of the colonial relationship that tethers colonial/postcolonial cultural production to France. Furthermore, because “Francophone literature” tacitly departed from the term’s denotative meaning (“literature produced by speakers of French”) to refer to “literature produced by former colonial subjects who speak French,” the question of how to classify literature in French from Belgium, Switzerland, or Quebec implicitly took to task the validity of the term. In the early 2000s, a critical gesture that combined the term “postcolonial” with “francophone” sought to preserve the particularity of Francophone literary production from the former colonies while at the same time underscoring the specifically Francophone contributions to postcolonial theory. Proponents of “Francophone Postcolonial Studies”

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called for the inclusion of “France” in the category “Francophone” (thus transcending the colonizer-colonized binary), and reinvested in Francophone theorists such as Fanon and Memmi, demonstrating and valorizing the manner in which these writers produced discourse in a postcolonial mode before the advent of the term, thus making a convincing argument for a francophone basis to postcolonial studies and theory (Forsdick and Murphy 2003: 7). Whereas “Francophone Postcolonial Studies” sought to address the perceived shortcomings of francophonie by reframing the term conceptually, the more recent “Manifeste pour une littérature-monde en français”—published in Le Monde des livres and signed by 44 writers— sought to do away with francophonie altogether”2 (Barbery et al 2007). Spreading the “best of news,” the manifesto configured itself as merely representative of an existing literary phenomenon, namely that the “world is returning,” the “center is henceforth everywhere… placed on an equal plane with all other centers”—evidenced by the success of nonmetropolitan writers in French literary prize competitions—and as such, the days of francophonie, “the last avatar of colonialism,” were numbered. “Une littérature-monde en français,” has, inarguably, constituted a nothing less than a phenomenon within French literary circles, generating it in its relatively brief life span of 6 years proportionally more discussion (in terms of conference time and edited volumes) than either “francophonie” or “francophone postcolonial” have seen in their longer existences.3 Coupled with an evident desire on the part of scholars to clear out categorical cobwebs and embrace the new, the capacity of littératuremonde to produce a certain critical “buzz” and to open (or re-open) related conversations—cosmopolitanism (Jensen); travel literature (Forsdick 2005); universalism (Lionnet); Weltliteratur (too many to name); the genre of the manifesto (Murphy, Reek)—may nonetheless obscure some of its conceptual shortcomings. As an alternative critical gesture, in what follows, I would like to examine the effects of reading the blind spots of littérature-monde as potential sites of inquiry. To do so I will call upon writings by a number of Francophone Maghrebi writers, all of whom—in ways both tacit and explicit—have sought to “come to terms” with a literary production that is highly resistant to classification by any single rubric. By placing works by Maghrebi writers in dialog with the littérature-monde manifesto, this essay seeks to 1) demonstrate the existence of a “local” literary theory at work in Maghrebi literature and underscore its relevance for contemporary debates about terminology; 2) signal the ways in which littérature-monde can be understood as repackaging, rather than rejecting, francophonie; and 3) theorize perpetual

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terminological dissatisfaction as an inherent component of contemporary literary studies in French.

Made in the Maghreb: Notes toward a “Local” Theory In the current climate, the Empire is no longer signified as “writing back”—a positioning that implied that the former colony’s unique interlocutor was, perforce, metropolitan; to the contrary, calls have gone out to “decenter” the center (Narayan 2000) and to “decolonize the republic” (Dine 2008). The littérature-monde manifesto, with its assertion that “the center is henceforth everywhere, at the 4 corners of the world,”4 (Barbery 2010: 113) seems to hew to a similar logic; however, even insofar as it calls upon a raft of writers who hail from outside the hexagon and deploys a vocabulary of positive dispersion, the manifesto’s material position in and emanation from that very center it seeks to unmoor remains problematic. Although Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, the two major figures behind the manifesto (and the subsequent edited volume), are known for working from the margins of the French literary establishment—their literary festival “Etonnants voyageurs,” held annually in Saint-Malo, a port town in Brittany, attests by virtue of its location to a “decentering” impulse—their choice, and indeed, their ability to publish the manifesto in Le Monde des livres, arguably the citadel of French literary taste-making, dilutes the manifesto’s message and, paradoxically, underscores their position of relative power within the system.5 Yet if we truly wanted to de-center our terminology, it would be possible to look definitively away from the putative center to chart how a particular region of the Francophone world has dealt with the categorization of its own literary corpus and the relationships of that corpus to national, linguistic, and colonial paradigms. Indeed, since the 1960s and the era of political and cultural re-organization that followed decolonization, and often working far from the maddening roar of Parisianist literary quarrels, Maghrebi writers have theorized categories, terms, and tenets for their own literary production. Their work, however, does not constitute a monolithic block: while some of these writers were interested in new coinages, others sought to reinvest existing terminology with new or refined meaning; while Albert Memmi and Abdelkebir Khatibi worked transnationally (spanning the Maghreb and reaching across the Mediterranean to France), Malek Haddad, writing from a critical moment in Algerian history, focused on the promotion of national culture. Regardless of the specificity of their inquiries, each of these writers was acutely aware of the power of, and need for, adequate terms.

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Algerian writer Malek Haddad was one of the first Maghrebi writers to reflect upon the categories used to describe both writers and the literary production of Algeria as it stood on the tipping point of independence. Published as a preface to his 1961 collection of poetry titled Ecoute et je t’appelle, the essay Les zéros tournent en rond is a 40 page-long literary object in its own right, despite its apparent status as an appendage to the 100 pages of poetry it precedes. In Les zéros, Hadded wrestles with the definition of the category “Algerian writer” by analyzing a number of writers’ responses to the following question, put to them by journalist André Marissel in the French literary review Les nouvelles littéraires: “When we talk about Algerian writers, we generally use the term to designate both European writers born in Algeria and Muslim, Arabic, and Berber writers. Is the term ‘Algerian writer’ ambiguous?”6 (Marissel 1960: 1) Under the headline “Algerian Writers Explain Themselves,”7 we find brief responses from both indigenous Algerian writers (Mouloud Feraoun, Mohammed Dib, Malek Ouary and Feraoun) as well as from pied-noir, or ethnically French writers (Gabriel Audisio, Jules Roy, René-Jean Clot, Henri Kréa, and Roger Curel). While most of the writers of European extraction minimize the notion of ambiguity, Clot calls the slippage in the term “Algerian writer” a “recent phenomenon”; Roy notes that it is “no more ambiguous today than it was in the past”; and Kréa claims that the term unambiguously refers to a person who “has chosen Algeria as his country,” regardless of ethnic or racial origin. Haddad is the only respondent to diagnose an ambiguity born of a lack of consensus on the meaning of the word “Algerian” and the existence of a “linguistic drama.” According to Haddad, “the complexity comes directly from the fact that we writers of arabo-berber origin have been taught to sing in a language… that is not our native tongue.” (Marissel 1960: 2) In his longer reflection in Les zéros tournent en rond, however, Haddad allows for the possibility of a certain terminological ambiguity while at the same time suggesting ways in which the concept of the “Algerian writer” might be “expurgated of all ambiguity”8 (Haddad 1961: 27). His analyses center almost exclusively on the responses proffered by pied-noir writers Clot, Roy, Curel and Kréa, all of whom are French, and yet unproblematically embrace their status as “Algerian writers.” While Haddad does not overtly deny that these writers may indeed be “Algerian,” implicit in his reading of their explanations is a resistance to their inclusion in the category. Jules Roy, for example, asserts that: “The diversity of origins found in Algeria is proof of its spiritual richness; the country is one big family with numerous arms, a tree whose roots find purchase in a wide variety of soils and cultures but whose branches all

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reach toward the same light, the same sensuality, the same love of justice and of liberty”9 (Haddad 1961: 25). Haddad offers a correction to Roy, and not without a hint of irony: We find [Roy’s definition] a bit loose, and we think that we represent the soul of a country that is suffering and fighting, rather than ‘a big family with lots of arms.’ I know that words can be frightening and I know how simplistic it is to reduce a problem’s complexity to one or two elements; however, at a critical moment in history such as this one, a person’s level of belonging can only be measured by his willing and complete participation in the community’s political and military struggle.10 (Haddad 1961: 25)

Again, it is crucial to underscore that Haddad does not explicitly deny Roy’s or any other writer’s claims of belonging to a federation of Algerian writers; rather, here, as in his other remonstrances, he identifies intellectual and political engagement with the Algerian struggle for independence as the key criteria in determining a writer’s accession to the category “Algerian writer.” For Haddad, it is not enough to lay claim to an identity: “Wanting to be Algerian does not make it so”11 (32). While he scrupulously avoids metaphorically deporting the Franco-Algerian writers from their adopted country, and if he is convinced that those who have chosen Algeria as their homeland will participate alongside indigenous Algerians in the construction of a common future, it is also clear that this future is first and foremost arabophone (while nonetheless allowing for a degree of bilingualism): The teaching of Arabic… our national language… will allow it to seep into all domains of intellectual activity. Even Algerians of French extraction will learn the language, which will allow them to further bond with the rest of their Algerian countrymen. This does not mean that they will forget or renounce the French language… It bears repeating that the French language in Algeria is heretofore an integral part of our national patrimony.12 (Haddad 1961: 37)

Haddad was thus deeply invested in a national project that ascribed a denotative meaning to “Algerian writer” and if this meant an eventual return to Arabic, Haddad nonetheless gestured to the French language as constitutive of that same project. The “pure” category of “Algerian writer”—“expurgated of ambiguity”—seems then to nonetheless include some level of tolerance for miscegenation. As we will see, however, Haddad’s terminological positioning was the polar opposite of Memmi’s: rather than a liberal application of the category “francophone” as an

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umbrella that could unite colonizers and colonized, Haddad would invite writers of French extraction to join the category of “Algerian writers,” with the understanding that that category’s inherent bilingualism would not be dominated by French. Although it is not the first attempt to theorize a trans-regional Maghrebi literature—Driss Chraïbi attempted a taxonomy in “Littérature nord-africaine d’expression française” (1960)—Albdelkébir Khatibi’s 1968 study Le roman maghrébin was certainly the most sustained, genredelimited engagement of the sort, and one of the few to be published as a full-length book.13 Less a literary investigation of the “writerly” in the Maghrebi novel, Khatibi’s investigation is rather, according to Marc Gontard, “a politically-based value judgment that contrasts ethnographic and militant literature, ordering them chronologically around an historical turning point that occurred when the francophone North African writer first became aware of his acculturation” (Gontard 1992: 33). While Gontard appears to suggest that Le roman maghrébin carries little value as a work of literary criticism, Khatibi’s essay is of interest insofar as the critical maneuvers contained therein offer fodder for deconstruction; more pointedly, his apparent disengagement from the question of categories (particularly linguistic, but also national) leaves the actual definition of the Maghrebi novel in the lurch. Khatibi writes in his Forward: “…the Maghrebi novel has typically been the product of French-language writers, while Arabophone writers have been more drawn to poetry, the essay, and short stories. The reader who is not aware of this might not notice the great disparity in the evolution of literary genres in the Maghreb.” (Khatibi 1968: 7)14 Thus Khatibi’s refusal to qualify the designation “Maghrebi novel” with an indicator of language, appears at first to be purely pragmatic: if the only existing novels in the Maghreb are those written in French, then why burden an already adequate descriptor? However, the numerous references throughout Le Roman maghrebin to novels written in Arabic would appear to contradict the assertion that the Maghrebi novel is simply “the product of French-language writers.” Delimiting the parameters of his study to genre and eliding, discursively, the Arabophone novelists, Khatibi sidesteps the thorny issue of linguistic diversity and belonging as participating in the criteria for defining literary categories. The Tunisian novelist Albert Memmi is not primarily known as a literary theorist, yet his role as editor and prefacer of three anthologies of Maghrebi literature in French afford him a position as arbiter of literary categories.15 The tomes’ titles alone—Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française (1964), Anthologie des écrivains français du Maghreb (1969), and Ecrivains francophones du Maghreb: une anthologie

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(1985)—suggest an effort at categorization and a slippage in the categories as they are created, laying bare not only the difficulty of establishing criteria for inclusion but also of adequately defining those criteria.16 The 1964 anthology, for example, presents writings by “Maghrebi writers of French expression”: authors who are from North Africa and whose language of (literary) expression is French. Being from North Africa, however, is not a discrete category, and as Memmi points out in the Forward: “We restricted our selection to works written by autochthonous writers.”17 (Memmi 1964: 9) In this instance, “autochthonous writer” refers to indigenous authors of Arabo-Muslim, Berber, Jewish, or Christian extraction.18 It is a curious qualification: other than authochthonous, what other kind of Maghrebi author is there? The second anthology (1969) answers that question and, in a surprising maneuver, reverses the conceit of the first anthology by featuring an entirely different set of authors: the Anthologie des écrivains français du Maghreb presents writers who are not “of the Maghreb” in an ethnic or national sense; rather, they are European colonists (French subjects for the most part) residing in Algeria, Morocco or Tunisia. “The second tome, which we present here today, groups together, in another synthetic portrait, the former colonies’ European inhabitants or inhabitants of European extraction.”19 (Memmi 1969:12) In devoting this second anthology exclusively to writers of European origin (Eberhardt, Audisio, Roy), Memmi anticipates the critique of a division that respects the colonial pecking order, with natives on one side and imperialists on the other: “Would we not end up, paradoxically, hewing to the same colonial categories that I had once criticized, and that effectively claimed to fix for eternity the distinguishing characteristics of the two groups?”20 (Memmi 1969: 12) In answer to his own question, Memmi insists on a rationale that might be described as “separate but equal[ly important].” According to the author, no desire to erase the divisions of the colonial past can ever evacuate the reality of their existence, and Memmi’s two-tome solution to the presentation of literature from the Maghreb written in French is reminiscent of the dialectical rhetoric staged in his seminal essay on colonization,21 in which the portrait of the colonized stands alongside, and is linked to, that of the colonizer. As Memmi takes pains to explain, the situation of colonization (“le fait colonial”) creates both the colonized and the colonizer;22 it follows, then, that the same situation produces literature from both parties, and that both literatures must be taken into account: It is enough to read their texts together in this manner to grasp the extent to which all writers from North Africa, Colonizers and Colonized, lived, each

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If, in 1964 and 1969, separate portraits were needed to paint an accurate historical fresco of North African literature from the colonial period and its immediate aftermath, by 1985 lexical winds had blown a new term in Memmi’s direction. Ecrivains francophones du Maghreb was a transnational Francophone endeavor conceived to bring together, under a single title, both the colonizer and the colonized French-speaking writer. This gesture ended the anthological apartheid that may have been suggested by the “separate but equal” status of the 1964 and 1969 collections. According to Memmi, the use of the term “francophone” was rendered viable by historical conjuncture and the abating of tensions that accompanied the immediate aftermath of colonial independence: “The turmoil of History having more or less subsided, shouldn’t we reevaluate our classifications as well in light of these changes?” (Memmi 1985: 12)24 Thus, in the 1985 anthology, Assia Djebar finds her place alongside Isabelle Eberhardt, Chraïbi alongside Camus, Kateb alongside Roblès. Such treatment would have been unthinkable in an earlier historical context in which the colonizer/colonized binary dominated the cultural imaginary and when the term “francophone” was viewed with suspicion: I must state here how much the notion of francophonie, that we once experienced as spontaneously as Monsieur Jourdain wrote prose, has been helpful to us. It hasn’t always been popular. Certain people saw it as a last ruse of colonialism, a way of maintaining, through culture, a weakened political stranglehold…. But it is true that an important event has occurred: French, having ceased to be the language of a colonial nation, should no longer raise any particular suspicion. Today, Francophonie simply means that the French language miraculously unites a group of writers from the world over.25 (Memmi 1985: 14, emphasis mine)

Miracles of spontaneous francophonie notwithstanding, Memmi had not always been optimistic about the fate of French-language literature from the colonized world. As already mentioned, prior to his work on the aforementioned anthologies, Memmi himself predicted the demise of a certain iteration of francophonie well before the concept had been institutionalized. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, he intoned a funerary hymn for French literature from the Maghreb, stating that for a variety of irreconcilable factors, “colonized literature in European languages appears condemned to die young.”26 (Memmi 1991: 111) Yet,

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what had seemed inevitable in the immediate aftermath of Tunisian and Moroccan decolonization and in light of the continuing struggle for Algerian independence—that is, the ascendency of Arabic as part of a larger project of national self-affirmation—did not come to pass. Thus, in his preface to the 1985 Anthologie, before elaborating his rational for a critical embrace of the term francophone, Memmi felt compelled to recant the prediction made in 1957: While I have not ceased to believe that Arabic will find the place it deserves, I was forced to admit that the natural resistance of habit is stronger than logical or sentimental predictions. Not only has French in the Maghreb maintained its importance and its prestige (…), new writers are also using the language just as naturally as their ancestors did and sometimes even with greater freedom.27 (Memmi 1985: 10-11)

It is evident that Haddad, Khatibi, and Memmi, all of whom struggle in their texts with a similar set of taxonomical problems, arrive at different conclusions ranging from a resolutely national, to a pan-regional, to a transnational solution that seeks to transcend colonial binaries. While all three propositions have encountered their detractors (or simply failed to be adopted by a larger critical community), this brief tour of their “working through” of terminology seeks to illuminate the thought of writers and critics who—operating at a cultural or geographical remove from the would-be center—have attempted to theorize their own corpus of cultural productions in ways that account for both a “local” specificity and the demands of an increasingly globalized readership. Unlike littératuremonde, which proposes a novel category from within a centrist positionality, the Maghrebi critics have worked from within their exentrism to come to terms that define an existing praxis.

Littérature-Monde as Francophonie Repackaged Memmi’s own francophone turn was less epiphany than empirical: for him, the writers he sought to anthologize were already living “the notion of francophonie,” spontaneously and naturally, “like Monsieur Jourdain wrote prose”28 (Memmi 1985, 14). Whereas Memmi found his way to francophonie by realizing that he was already there, the past decade has seen much critical energy devoted to finding a way out of francophonie, to locating a replacement that might delimit and define the same corpus in terms less laden with the baggage of imperialism. The signatories of the littérature-monde manifesto proposed detaching the French language from its “exclusive pact with the nation” and articulated a clear mise à mort for

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francophonie: “the emergence of a consciously affirmed, transnational world literature in the French language, open to the world, signs the death certificate of so-called francophone literature.”29 (Barbery 2010: 115) Although the manifesto baptizes this new world order with the neologism littérature-monde, its rhetoric of Copernican revolution describes what might well be labeled a post-francophone world in which francophone, as both a term and a concept, has reached the limits of its utility. The littérature-monde manifesto immediately stirred passions, prompting discussions within scholarly circles, institutional francophonie, and the popular press.30 That the notion continues to be a subject of inquiry and polemic, as evidenced by the numerous edited volumes and conferences devoted to the topic, seems to imply that a moment of change is indeed upon us, and that scholars of francophone literature will need to come to terms, once again, with their way the name their objects of study.31 Read carefully, however, and particularly in light of other attempts to establish taxonomies (such as those discussed here), the littérature-monde manifesto may be, in its fundamental precepts, less novel that it initially claimed to be. Indeed, the manifesto appears to reprise, albeit unintentionally, many of the ideas previously articulated by Memmi in his 1985 preface—albeit to ends that are diametrically different. Whereas one essay condemns the very same notion that the other espouses, the two texts produce remarkably similar discourses in service of these divergent aims. To state that the littérature-monde manifesto and Memmi’s 1985 preface share certain ideological underpinnings may appear provocative or simply erroneous, given that the former plainly seeks to do away with the concept embraced by the latter. Nonetheless, in spite of their conflicting interests, it is impossible to ignore a number of convergences in the two essays’ rhetoric. In both cases, each text describes a literary category that is culturally and geographically diverse yet united by language. The manifesto claims that littérature-monde is an appropriate term because “literatures in French around the world today are demonstrably multiple, diverse, forming a vast ensemble, the ramifications of which link together several continents” and because we bear witness today to “a vast polyphonic ensemble.”32 (Barbery 2010: 116) Memmi’s preface stakes out similar territory for francophonie, which “today simply means that the French language miraculously brings together a number of writers from all over the world” (Memmi 1985: 12). Here, the manifesto’s linking (enlacement) of diversity and plurality can be located implicitly in Memmi’s choice of the expression “to bring together” (réunir), and both texts use the same construction in French—de par le monde (“around the

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world”/”all over the world”)—to gesture to the transnational nature of the grouping in question. Both the littérature-monde text and Memmi’s preface are also acutely aware of the specter of colonialism in the constitution of the body of literature they describe. The manifesto states that “the ‘francophone’ concept presents itself as the last avatar of colonialism. What these fall prizes confirm is the inverse notion: that the colonial pact is broken, that language thus liberated has become everyone's concern.”33 (Barbery 2010: 116) Notwithstanding its ultimate approbation of francophonie, Memmi’s preface nonetheless demonstrates an awareness of its tainted legacy, while suggesting at the same time that this legacy has been overcome: Certain people saw it as a last ruse of colonialism, a way of maintaining, through culture, a weakened political stranglehold (…) But it is true that an important event has occurred: French, having ceased to be the language of a colonial nation, should no longer raise any particular suspicion. (Memmi 1985: 14)

Ironically, given its bald rejection of francophonie, the manifesto would appear to have reached the same conclusion as Memmi. In stating that the results of the 2006 literary prize season prove that the colonial pact is “broken” and language belongs to everyone, the text of the manifesto in fact implies that the colonial legacy of francophonie has already been surpassed. Indeed, the notion that “language thus liberated has become everyone’s concern” resonates as a variation on Memmi’s theme that French “having ceased to be the language of a colonial nation, should no longer raise any particular suspicion.” Nonetheless, and in spite of these fundamental similarities, it cannot be denied that the texts differ in several ways. In addition to their ultimate choice of terms, they put forward divergent visions of the métropole as it relates to language. The littérature-monde manifesto clearly seeks to cast francophonie aside because it views the term as bonding formerly colonized French-language writers to the imperial nation: “…we’re witnessing the birth of a new constellation, in which language freed from its exclusive pact with the nation, free from every other power hereafter but the powers of poetry and the imaginary, will have no other frontiers but those of the spirit”34 (Barbery 2010: 116). Curiously, other than its recognition of francophonie’s possible signification as “a last ruse of colonialism,” Memmi’s preface makes no reference to the French nation. If anything, for the 1985 anthology, francophonie—as a term and concept—creates a pact between a set of French-language writers (both French and native North Africans) and the Maghreb: “All those who,

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through their use of French and in spite of cultural specificities, participate in a single cultural field and trace the borders of a certain literary space: that of the francophone Maghrebi writer.”35 (Memmi 1985, 14) Paradoxically, then, the concept of francophonie in Memmi’s preface suggests the possibility of divorcing language from its national referent and thus retaining French as a common denominator while eliminating France; littérature-monde, however, jettisons both language and nation. If we are indeed witnessing a moment where “constellations” are being formed, and where soon a “language will have no other frontiers but those of the spirit,” it is worth probing the limits of those extant mental boundaries. Given the similarities between littérature-monde as defined in the manifesto and francophonie as defined by Memmi’s preface, does this new term constitute an improvement? Memmi’s work suggests that terms and classifications are only as useful as their appropriateness to the given contexts they propose to describe, and that it behooves the critics and arbiters of categories to ensure that terms keep time with historical changes. Notwithstanding this flexibility, Memmi nonetheless remains loyal to a certain degree of terminological pragmatism: his preface makes clear that despite potential associations with colonization, francophonie adequately and elegantly fulfills a necessary function. If we are to accept the death of francophonie because of its associations with an imperial nation and its language, it is nonetheless incumbent upon all readers to think critically about the functionality of littérature-monde as its replacement. Just as the polysemia of francophone and francophonie has been parsed and deconstructed, so must the multiple meanings and allusions and conjured by the term littérature-monde be considered. The formulation is relatively close to littérature du monde (world literature). World literature, however, particularly as it has been practiced as an academic subfield, tends to refer to works of literature that are not “from here,” which makes it a relative term, dependent on where “here” is.36 The potential association with world literature, and its center-margin paradigm, would appear to be at cross purposes with the littérature-monde ethos, whereby “the center is henceforth everywhere, at the four corners of the world.”37 The writers of the manifesto, however, very carefully formulated a neologism inimical to translation as “world literature in French.” Rather, littérature-monde en français indicates a “literature-world in French.” As such, the term seems to derive from a concept in economics known as une économie-monde, developed by French historian Fernand Braudel and defined as “a slice of the planet that is economically autonomous, essentially self-sufficient and whose internal links and exchanges afford it

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an organic unity of sorts.”38 (Braudel 1979: 12) According to economist David Ormrod: “a world-economy (économie-monde or Weltwirtschaft) should not be confused with the world economy as a whole. It refers rather to a fragment of the world…”39 (Omrod 2004: 4) Braudel’s definition further explains that “an economy-world always has a pole, a center, represented by a dominant city, a city state in the past, today a capital, by which we mean an economic capital (in the United States, New York, not Washington, DC.”40 (Braudel 1979: 85) Une économie-monde, then, is a self-sufficient, self-sustaining, coherent grouping that delimits itself from other groupings and which contains, within itself, a hierarchical structure. Understood as a variation on économie-monde, littérature-monde thus carries with it a set of connotations that may be neither desired nor desirable. While littérature-monde certainly and appropriately retains the transnational flavor of économie-monde, the hermetic nature of this delimited world and its reliance on a center-periphery structure contradict the desire for the profusion of “centers” and a language without borders that the manifesto hopes to engender. Thus, like francophone and francophonie, littérature-monde promises “to be ‘semantically tortuous and conceptually hazardous’” (Jardine 1985: 15), albeit more so and for different reasons. From a practical point of view, it is difficult to understand how the term might function outside the context of the manifesto and its passions, when set against the exigencies of the “real” world. Can the term be instrumentalized? Will universities create littérature-monde departments to replace departments of French and Francophone Studies? Will the writers themselves, heretofore described by the adjective francophone, be redubbed littérature-mondialistes? And their works? Rebaptized littérature-mondiale? Notwithstanding such issues of nomenclature, does this new appellation solve any of the questions originally posed with regard to francophone literature? Does the term illuminate how this particular authorial status inflects our readings, the texts’ reception, and so forth? Does littérature-monde escape classifying a literature by virtue of its writers’ difference? Finally, does its nominal detachment from a linguistic marker—given that the littérature-monde in question remains linguistically marked—serve a deeper epistemological function? Given a paradigm shift where language would be allowed to supplant the nation as a unit of taxonomy, Memmi opted in 1985 to embrace a term that, despite its charged history, could unite rather than divide. Francophone and francophonie, for Memmi, offered the possibility of adequately naming a body of literature; by extension, this allows for the dissemination, study, and theorization of a literary field. In proposing to do

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away with francophonie, the littérature-monde manifesto effectively attempts to usher in a moment that can only properly be called postfrancophone. Yet to call this new reality by the name that most accurately describes it would be impossible, at least according to the cultural politics of the signatories of the manifesto, for to articulate this moment of revolution as post-francophone would be to remain faithful to a logic and nomenclature it desperately wishes to surpass. And, at the same time, we can no more be truly post-francophone than we can be post-language, for notwithstanding the charge that “no one speaks francophone,” as the manifesto itself attests, people still speak and write in French. Rather than attempt to scrub away the very last trace of colonialism from the terminology used to describe the phenomenon of formerly colonized writers writing in French, perhaps we could agree to understand this trace differently, and to recognize that the terms francophone and francophonie embody a pragmatics and, by extension, a politics that actually serves poetics in a way that une littérature-monde en français simply cannot. Despite this rather critical stance with regard to littérature-monde, the lasting and continuing conversations it has fostered suggest that the idea contains some staying power, irrespective of its practical and hermenutical shortcomings where the work of literary criticism is concerned. Indeed, it simply may be that there is no single term that can encompass the variety and disparity of origins, ideas, representations, and story worlds contained within an entity that is as large as the world itself. Ahmad’s observation regarding our need to “come to terms,” then, is perhaps better understood in is present progressive iteration, as an on-going process of “coming to terms;” indeed, the continued struggle for definitions that has attended the rise of francophonie and has been its constant compagnon de route seems to be a necessary condition for the persistence of this scholarship. While none of the terms we come to seem to be entirely satisfying, perhaps the next step is simply to come to terms with dissatisfaction and allow it to function as a productive critical tool.

Notes 1

Ahmad’s formulation (rendered in French as “d’expression française”) is reminiscent of the phrasing used by Driss Chraïbi and Albert Memmi to describe Maghrebi French-language literary productions. See Chraïbi 1960 and Memmi, 1964. 2 The 44 signatories include writers working in French with origins in a variety of countries, including France. As Lydie Moudileno has pointed out, the same year that the manifesto “Pour une littérature-monde en français” appeared, the May

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issue of the PMLA took on the question of postcolonial theory in an editor’s column titled “The End of Postcolonial Theory?” (Moudileno 2010: 109) 3 For an exploration of the status of littérature-monde as an “event,” see Moudileno 2010. 4 “…le centre est désormais partout, aux quatre coins du monde.” (Barbery 2007: 2) 5 Furthermore, as Dominic Thomas has pointed out, no beur writers were invited to participate in the manifesto. (Thomas 2010: 53) 6 “Quand il est question d’écrivains algériens, on fait allusion, en général, aussi bien à des auteurs d’origine européenne, nés en Algérie, qu’à des écrivains musulmans, arabes et kabyles. Considérez-vous que cette expression ‘écrivains algériens’ ne comporte aucune ambigüité?” 7 “Les Ecrivains algériens s’expliquent” 8 “…épuré de toute ambigüité…” 9 “La diversité des origines est une preuve de la richesse spirituelle de l’Algérie, grande famille aux membres multiples dont l’arbre généalogique plonge ses racines à travers des couches de sols et de cultures extrêmement variés, mais dont les branches et les rameaux s’élèvent vers la même lumière, la même sensualité, le même amour de la justice et de la liberté.” 10 “Nous regrettons un certain flou [dans la définition proposée par Roy] et nous pensons que nous représentons davantage l’âme d’une patrie qui souffre et qui se bat qu’une ‘grande famille aux membres multiples.’ Je sais ce que les mots peuvent avoir d’effrayant et je sais combien il est simpliste de réduire la complexité d’un problème à la schématisation d’un ceci ou d’un cela; mais à une heure de pointe de l’Histoire, l’appartenance à une communauté se mesure à l’adhésion sans réserve et sans regret à la lutte politique et militaire de cette communauté.” 11 “N’est pas totalement Algérien qui veut.” 12 “L’enseignement de la langue arabe… langue nationale… fera que celle-ci imprégnera et envahira tous les domaines de l’activité intellectuelle. Les Algériens d’origine française eux-mêmes apprendront cette langue qui les soudera davantage au reste de leurs compatriotes. Ils n’oublieront pas et ne renieront pas pour autant la langue française… Il n’est pas inutile de répéter que la langue française en Algérie fait désormais partie intégrante de notre patrimoine nationale.” 13 Le roman maghrebin was Khatibi’s doctoral thesis in sociology; the first thesis devoted to Maghrebi literature, it was completed under the supervision of Albert Memmi at the Sorbonne. 14 “…le roman maghrébin a été surtout le fait des écrivains de langue française, alors que ceux d’expression arabe ont cultivé plus particulièrement la poésie, l’essai et la nouvelle. Le lecteur non averti risque de ne pas percevoir la grande disparité dans l’évolution des genres littéraires au Maghreb.” 15 Memmi historicizes his effort to categorize North African writing in French, noting that “l’effort d’apparenter les œuvres nées en Afrique du Nord remonte pourtant au début du siècle” [still, the job of situating the works originating in North Africa goes back to the beginning of the century]. This effort would be followed in the 1930s by Audisio and Camus in their founding of the “Ecole

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d’Alger,” sometimes known as the “Ecole nord-africaine des lettres.” (Memmi 1964: 11) 16 Charles Bonn has called this third anthology “la première consécration universitaire de cette jeune littérature” [the first university-level recognition of this young literature]. (Bonn 1993: 40) 17 “Nous nous en sommes tenus aux œuvres écrites par des Autochthones.” 18 The term autochthonous, which I have chosen to translate literally for the sake of clarity, tends to be deployed ambiguously and is sometimes conflated with “indigène” (or indigenous). For Richard Watts, “autochthones” refers to “people of French extraction living in the colonies” whereas “indigène” describes people of Maghrebi extraction, generally born in the colonies. It is important, therefore, to recognize that not all “autochthones” are created equal. See Watts 2002: 61. 19 “Le tome II, que nous présentons aujourd’hui, grouperait, en un autre portraitsynthèse, les habitants européens, ou d’origine européenne, des ex-colonies.” 20 “N’allions-nous pas obéir, paradoxalement, à ces catégories colonisatrices, que j’avais tant dénoncées en leur temps, et qui prétendaient en effet figer pour l’éternité les traits distinctifs des deux peoples?” 21 See Memmi 1957 22 “Le mécanisme est quasi fatale: la situation coloniale fabrique des colonialistes comme elle fabrique des colonisés.” (Emphasis in original). [The mechanism is practically constant. The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just is it manufactures the colonized.] (Memmi 1957: 77; 1991: 56) 23 “Il suffit de lire leurs textes ainsi rapprochés, pour apercevoir à quel point tous les écrivains d’Afrique du Nord, Colonisateurs et Colonisés, ont vécu, chacun à leur manière, la relation coloniale.… Page de frustration, de carence et de refus pour les uns, page de gloire et de privilèges pour les autres, dont ils se sentaient plus ou moins confusément fiers et coupables, mais tous ont senti fortement et exprimé, plus ou moins directement, le fait colonial.” 24 “Les tumultes de l’Histoire s’étant un peu apaisés, ne devions-nous pas reprendre même nos classements en fonction de ces changements?” 25 “Je dois dire ici combien la notion de francophonie, (…) est venue à notre secours. Elle n’a pas toujours eu bonne presse. Certains y voyaient une dernière ruse de la colonisation, une manière de maintenir, culturellement, une emprise politiquement défaillante.… Mais il est vrai qu’un événement considérable est advenu: le français, ayant cessé d’être la langue d’une nation colonisatrice, ne devrait plus soulever de suspicion particulière.… La Francophonie signifie simplement aujourd’hui que la langue française réunit miraculeusement un certain nombre d’écrivains de par le monde.” 26 “…la littérature colonisée de langue européenne semble condamnée à mourir jeune.” (Memmi 1957: 128) 27 “Sans cesser de croire que la langue arabe finira par retrouver la place qu’elle mérite, j’ai dû admettre que la résistivité naturelle des mœurs est plus puissante que la prévision logique ou sentimentale. Non seulement la langue française n’a rien perdu, au Maghreb, en importance et en prestige mais (…) les écrivains les plus neufs l’empruntaient à leur tour, avec le même naturel que leurs aînés, et, quelquefois même, avec plus de liberté.”

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“…comme Monsieur Jourdain faisait de la prose.” “libérée de son pacte exclusif avec la nation…”; “…l’émergence d’une littérature-monde en langue française consciemment affirmée, ouverte sur le monde, transnationale, signe l’acte de décès de la francophonie.” (Barbery 2007 : 2) 30 Too numerous too cite, I nonetheless draw the reader’s attention to Françoise Lionnet’s excellent critical analysis, “Universalisms and Francophonies” (2009) and Camille de Toledo’s Vister le Flurkistan ou les illusions de la littératuremonde (2008). The manifesto also drew the criticism of Abdou Diouf, general secretary of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. In an article titled “La francophonie, une réalité oubliée,” Diouf writes: “Je déplore surtout que vous ayez choisi de vous poser en fossoyeurs de la Francophonie, non pas sur la base d'arguments fondés, ce qui aurait le mérite d'ouvrir un débat, mais en redonnant vigueur à des poncifs qui ont décidément la vie dure” [I particularly deplore your choice to hold yourselves up as the grave diggers of francophonie, not on the basis of grounded arguments, which would have had the benefit of opening the debate, but by giving new energy to clichés that have been worn out]. (Diouf 2007: 24) 31 Again, too numerous to cite in extenso, I mention only the special issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 14.1 (January 2010), and international colloquia organized in places as diverse as Tallahassee (“Littératuremonde: new wave or new hype?” Florida State University, Feb 12-14, 2009) and Algiers (“Littérature-monde: Enjeux et perspectives, Université d’Alger, Feb 2325, 2009). 32 “…multiples, diverses, sont aujourd'hui les littératures de langue françaises de par le monde, formant un vaste ensemble dont les ramifications enlacent plusieurs continents;” “un vaste ensemble polyphonique” (Barbery 2007: 2) 33 “Ce qu'entérinent ces prix d'automne est le constat inverse: que le pacte colonial se trouve brisé, que la langue délivrée devient l'affaire de tous.” (Barbery 2007: 2) 34 “…c'est à la formation d'une constellation que nous assistons, où la langue libérée de son pacte exclusif avec la nation, libre désormais de tout pouvoir autre que ceux de la poésie et de l'imaginaire, n'aura pour frontières que celles de l'esprit.” (Barbery 2007: 2) 35 “Tous ceux qui, utilisant le français, relèvent malgré tout, par-delà les cultures particulières, d’une même aire culturelle, et tracent un certain espace littéraire: celui de l’écrivain francophone du Maghreb.” 36 David Damrosch is useful here: “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language…a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture.” (Damrosch 2003: 4) 37 “…le centre est désormais partout, aux quatre coins du monde.” (Barbery 2007: 2) 38 “…un morceau de la planète économiquement autonome, capable pour l'essentiel de se suffire à lui-même et auquel ses liaisons et ses échanges intérieurs confèrent une certaine unité organique.” 29

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39

Omrod also cites Braudel’s Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. III, The Perspective of the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1981-1984). 40 “…une économie-monde accepte toujours un pôle, un centre, représenté par une ville dominante, jadis un Etat-ville, aujourd'hui une capitale, entendez une capitale économique (aux Etats-Unis, New York, non pas Washington).”

References Ahmad, Aijaz. “The Communist Manifesto and ‘World Literature.’” Social Scientist 28.7-8 (Jul-Aug 2000): 3-30. Barbery, Muriel et al. “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français.” Le Monde (Livres) 16 March 2007. —. “Toward a ‘World-Literature’ in French.” Trans. Daniel Simon. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14.1 (January 2010): 113-117. Braudel, Fernand. Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme. Tome 3: “Le temps du monde.” Paris: Armand Colin, 1979. Bonn, Charles. “Le découvreur, le défricheur et le vulgarisateur.” Hommes et Migrations 1171 (Dec 1993): 39-46. Chraïbi, Driss. “Littérature nord-africaine d’expression française.” Confluent 5 (Feb 1960): 24-29. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Dine, Philip. “Decolonizing the Republic.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 12.2 (April 2008): 173-181. Diouf, Abdou. “La francophonie, une réalité oubliée.” Le Monde (20 mars 2007): 24. Gontard, Marc. “Francophone North African Literature and Critical Theory.” Trans. Ruthmarie H. Mitsch. Research in African Literatures 23.3 (Summer 1992): 33-38. Hargreaves, Alec G., Charles Forsdick, and David Murphy, eds. Transnational French Studies. Postcolonialism and Littérature-Monde. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP, 2010. Forsdick, Charles and David Murphy, eds. “Introduction.” Francophone Postcolonial Studies. London: Arnold, 2003. Forsdick, Charles. “Etat présent. Between ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’: French Studies and the Postcolonial Turn. French Studies 59.4 (2005): 523-530. Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Jensen, Deborah. “Francophone World Literature (Littérature-monde), Cosmopolitanism and Decadence: ‘Citizen of the World’ without the

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Citizen?” Transnational French Studies. Postcolonialism and Littérature-Monde. Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, David Murphy, eds. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP, 2010.15-35. Khatibi, Abdelkabir. Le roman maghrébin. Paris: François Maspero, 1968. Lionnet, Françoise. “Universalisms and Francophonies.” International Journal of Francophone Studies 12.2-3 (2009): 203-221. MacDonald, Christie and Susan Rubin Suleiman, eds. “Introduction.” French Global: A New Approach to Literary History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. ix-xxi. Marissel, André. “Les écrivains algériens s’expliquent.” Les nouvelles littéraires 1728 (13 oct 1960): 1-5. Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé précédé de Portrait du colonisateur. Paris: Corréa, 1957; Gallimard, 1985. —. Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1964. —. Anthologie des écrivains français du Maghreb. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1969. —. Anthologie des écrivains francophones maghrébins. Paris: Seghers, 1985. —. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Trans. Howard Greenfeld. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Moudileno, Lydie. “Francophonie: Trash or Recycle?” Transnational French Studies. Postcolonialism and Littérature-Monde. Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, David Murphy, eds. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP, 2010. 109-124. Murphy, David. “The Postcolonial Manifesto: Partisanship, Criticism and the Performance of Change.” Transnational French Studies. Postcolonialism and Littérature-Monde. Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, David Murphy, eds. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP, 2010. 6788. Narayan, Uma and Sandra Harding, eds. Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial and Feminist World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2000. Ormrod, David. The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650-1770. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2004. Reek, Laura. “The World and the Mirror in Two Twenty-First Century Manifestos: ‘Pour une littérature-monde en français’ and ‘Qui fait la France?’” Transnational French Studies. Postcolonialsim and Littérature-Monde. Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, David Murphy, eds. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP, 2010. 258-273.

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Thomas, Dominic. “Decolonizing France: From National Literatures to World Literatures.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14:1 (2010): 47-55. Toledo, Camille de. Vister le Flurkistan ou les illusions de la littératuremonde. Paris: PUF, 2008. Watts, Richard. “‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur indigène?’ De la littérature coloniale à la littérature maghrébine.” Expressions maghrébines 1.1 (Summer 2002) 59-75.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE “TWO SOLITUDES”? FRANCOPHONE STUDIES AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORIES DOMINIQUE COMBE ÉCOLE NORMALE SUPERIEURE, PARIS (FRANCE)

Already in Two Solitudes (1945)1 the Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan depicted a divided Canadian society and the impossibility of communicating between Francophone and Anglophone communities. In the context of transatlantic migrations and the globalized megapolises of Toronto and Montreal,2 the question of communities and of the dialogue of languages and cultures is being raised with even more urgency despite the official policy of “reasonable accommodations” for multiculturalism as theorized by the philosopher Charles Taylor3 and denounced by Neil Bissoondath as a market of illusions (“marché aux illusions”).4 Beyond Canada, it is the relations between Anglophones and other linguistic communities that are at stake in today’s globalized cultural exchanges. National literatures, criticism, and literary theories, particularly in the case of the French language, have maintained complex and sometimes difficult relations, reflecting misunderstandings and incomprehension, with globalized Anglophone thought. The misunderstanding is first of all due to the contrasting and staggered reception of “Francophone” literatures in France and North America. Today these literatures are the object of broad academic recognition following their consecration by literary awards. But in French universities, Francophone studies developed later compared to the United States (and even to other European countries, such as Germany or Italy). The first comprehensive studies of the so-called “Francophone” literatures of the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Caribbean were published only in the Sixties. Even then, it still took several years for these literatures to become course topics in French or Comparative Literature departments.

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Francophone literatures were often judged “peripheral,” even “minor,” with respect to “French” literature. Among postcolonial Francophone authors, the only ones to have figured on national teacher recruitment exams were Senghor and Césaire, while writers of Indo-Pakistani, Caribbean, or Canadian origin were regularly chosen for the English literature exam. The study of Francophone literatures, at the outset a marginal field in education, has struggled for recognition, weakened moreover by disciplinary and institutional challenges, since the field is shared and disputed between departments of French and Comparative Literature. Moreover, to compound these difficulties, the study of Francophone literatures, including those from Switzerland, Belgium, and Quebec, cannot limit itself to the postcolonial in contrast to Anglophone studies, which always involve imperial, if not colonial, history. Add to all these reasons the narrow compartmentalization of disciplines, a phenomenon which is not unique to French universities. One must further mention the unfortunately rare instances of collaboration between scholars of English and French literatures, in France as well as in the United Kingdom, for example.

Postcolonial Studies in France In this context, Francophone studies, already poorly recognized, were undoubtedly insufficiently established to be able to welcome postcolonial theories coming from the United States and the Anglophone world. Thus Francophone literary studies have shown a degree of indifference, even hostility toward them, largely due to ignorance and inadequate knowledge. Even the author of the present article must acknowledge that the essay Poétiques francophones, published in 1995, which focused on the relations of Francophone writers to French and other languages, made no mention of Anglophone works. Before Jean-Marc Moura’s publication of Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale5 in 1999, postcolonial criticism was hardly known beyond English scholars6 and a few of their colleagues in Comparative Literature. It has taken about ten years from 1999 to 2009 to clear a path or “passage” between “Francophone writing” and “Postcolonial theory,” to use the title of an issue of the journal Littérature published in 2009.7 The social sciences have for a long time incorporated Anglophone contributions following the publication in the Eighties of the first translations of Edward W. Said, although heated debates, even controversies, continue to divide researchers.8 Even recently, the controversial essay by Africanist anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle9 and

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the pamphlet by political scientist Jean-François Bayart10 illustrate this division. Thus, in 2006, one of the first interdisciplinary conferences assessing the state of postcolonial studies in France was organized at Sciences Po in Paris.11 Even if postcolonial studies, far from eliciting unanimity, sparks discussion and controversy, it is now sufficiently wellrecognized as an integral part of the research landscape of the social sciences, as is the case for other similarly imported disciplines, due to translations which find without much trouble their natural audience among political scientists, historians, sociologists, and ethnologists. It now seems possible to take stock, on a philosophical level, of cultural studies and postcolonial theory, as in Francesco Fistetti’s book Théories du multiculturalisme. Un parcours entre philosophie et sciences sociales, a work itself tellingly translated from Italian.12 As noted by the participants in the 2006 conference, the reception of postcolonial theory seems mostly problematic for literary studies, perhaps because literature serves to “reveal” the “postcolonial situation.”13 Like cultural studies from which it arose, postcolonial studies had a late start in French research, at least in French literature. The obvious lack of translations and readability problems sometimes occasioned by those available may partly explain the dearth of interest in the great works of postcolonial theory, which have until recently remained largely unknown. Lagging by at least twenty years, French or Francophone publishers14 are only now beginning to publish translations of landmark essays such as Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (Les Lieux de la culture, 2007), Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? (Les Subalternes peuvent-elles parler?) and In Other Worlds (En d’autres mondes, en d’autres mots, 2009), Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (Provincialiser l’Europe, 2010), or Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (L’Atlantique noir, 2009), classics of long standing in the Anglophone world and elsewhere. No matter what one might think of their approaches, it is hard to fathom how thinkers as famous as Spivak or Bhabha15 had not been translated earlier, and that most of these “classics” have remained on the margins of French research. This disastrous situation, for which academic publishers, somewhat reluctant to publish translations, bear a significant share of responsibility, is not unique to postcolonial studies. Even without mentioning the “classic” essays on general literary theory by I.-A. Richards, Harold Bloom, Jonathan Culler, and Terry Eagleton, read and studied worldwide, French readers are still waiting for certain important books on French literature, originally published in English (or in other languages), to be translated. Essays by Said, the literary critic, the only author widely

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translated (albeit in a sometimes rough fashion), such as Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Individuality (1996), Beginnings (1975), and The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), with no direct political involvement, still await their translator.16 It is therefore mostly the literary and artistic dimensions of Said’s work that have been neglected by publishers as much as by critics. However, simply reading these works in the original would not offset this translation deficit. The difficulty, even in Paris, of gaining access to English-language books in the field of literary criticism, whose target audience is too limited to interest distributors, contributes considerably to the misunderstanding between the Anglo-Saxon world and France, often justly criticized abroad for its “arrogance,” an attitude which is shared, however, with the United Kingdom. The universalism of French criticism is seen as a supreme form of “provincialism.” However, we must point out with Jean-François Bayart17 that historians, the heirs of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Chaunu, and French social scientists who have influenced certain Anglophone thinkers critical of postcolonialism, did not await (the establishment of) postcolonial studies in order to work on empire and colonial domination. Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, for example, generally considered founders of postcolonial theory, began devoting their research to these domains already in the Fifties. The “double solitude” is primarily an issue of reciprocal ignorance. In the Francophone context, the dialogue has certainly not been facilitated by the name “postcolonial theory,” a designation often as vague and generalizing as “postmodern,” “post-structuralism,” or, especially, “French theory.” Similarly, Edward W. Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Robert J.C. Young, Paul Gilroy, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Arjun Appadurai—to cite only a few of the best-known names—have been conscripted under a common banner. Some, such as Aijaz Ahmad,18 Achille Mbembe,19 or Benita Parry20 have considerable reservations about, even hostility toward, “postcolonial theory,” which they subject to a Marxist-inspired or psychoanalytical critique. In reality the field of postcolonial studies is much more vast and complex than the simplified presentations by its French detractors, and sometimes even its defenders, despite their good intentions, would lead one to believe. Postcolonialism includes its own critique. Crisscrossed by multiple and diverse currents of thought in perpetual evolution, transformation, and even re-composition, the postcolonial field is far from being as unified and stable as the term “postcolonial theory,” used in the singular, suggests. It operates at the crossroads of different theoretical fields—“cultural” studies, “subaltern” studies, studies of “race,” of “gender,” “eco-criticism,” etc.—not necessarily better received or known, incidentally, by literary scholars,

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who readily criticize any approach judged to be sectarian. Implementing its own internal criticism, postcolonial studies have nonetheless been the scene of debates and confrontations of ideas and methods over the last twenty years (or so). Some North American scholars have already announced the end of postcolonial theory, now subsumed, according to them, by Global Studies, which is becoming the object of institutional recognition from the departments, seminars, conferences, and publications dedicated to it. The time has supposedly come for the age of World Literature, misleadingly renamed “littérature-monde” by Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris in their 2007 manifesto,21 based on a reductive reading of Edouard Glissant’s “Tout-monde.” Although proclaiming the need to undo the “pact with the nation,” the authors of the manifesto fail to break with an “atavistic” conception of literature, which they continue to consider from a French “center.” Just as English literature, according to Rouaud and Le Bris, incorporates the former Commonwealth colonies, these authors expand the scope of French literature by opening it to the world – to “Francophonie,” which is still presented, however, as obsolete.22 However, the belated and cautious reception of postcolonial studies in literary studies could paradoxically be a fruitful occasion to offer a distanced, critical reflection that might facilitate transatlantic dialogue, which itself is often a triangulation of the Americas, Europe, and Asia or Africa. It is indeed possible to recognize the decisive role that postcolonial theory has played for the study of English-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, Dutch-, and French-language literatures without necessarily pledging an allegiance to any one doctrine; if a body of doctrine is to be found in the myriad paths this research has taken in the Anglophone context. The time has come to provide a critical assessment of the field in order to promote a better appreciation of both its richness and diversity. The question arises, then, of connections between postcolonial theory and new approaches to Francophone texts implemented in France since the Eighties, approaches that followed “post-structuralism”—such as literary sociology, inspired by Bourdieu, or genetic criticism—not normally included in what is commonly called “French theory.” Following repeated calls for a stylistics and a poetics of Francophone texts23 over the last decade, Francophone studies now focuses more intently on the “verbal material” (le “matériau verbal”) of texts, without neglecting their historical, ideological, and political significance. The early works, intending to inventory and to map, in their infinite diversity, literatures first termed “French outside of France,” “French-language” or “of French expression,” then “Francophone,” were often guided by the bibliographical and historical necessity to establish corpora. They developed a rather

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broad documentary approach that took little account of the literary dimension of the text on stylistic or poetic levels, with a relative indifference or rather a lack of attention to the text as such and to its genesis. More generally, writing has long suffered from neglect in Francophone studies, which has (too) often tended to reduce the text to a document.24 The delayed reception of postcolonialism makes it possible today to bring Anglophone and Francophone theoretical models somewhat closer. One example is that of genetic criticism, which is opening promising perspectives, capable of (re)establishing communication between the two shores of the Atlantic and overcoming their respective “solitudes.” The key question of the relations between genetic criticism and postcolonial theory should thus be posed.

Genetic Criticism, Francophone, and Postcolonial Literatures Francophone literary studies in Switzerland and Quebec place much importance on the development of the text, as evidenced by the editions and works on Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz,25 Gaston Miron, or Hubert Aquin. Belgium maintains a strong and long-standing philological tradition, in which literary historians such as Joseph Hanse have excelled. This tradition has been extended by the textual genetic research of Marc Dominicy and David Gullentops. The Research Center for FrancophoneSwiss Literature at the University of Lausanne and the Research Center on Quebec Literature at the University of Montréal have long established programs of critical editions from archives, manuscripts and writers’ libraries, coupled with an owner-managed business of textual and manuscript preservation in the form of bequests and donations to the national and cantonal libraries or to private foundations. The emphasis on literature in the formation of “imagined communities” and cultural identities makes this approach indispensable. As philology did earlier, genetic criticism, which engages in critical reflection about “national” literary histories, thus constitutes an institutional, if not political, stake for research.26 Of course, the same issues are even more crucial for postcolonial literatures, which in the Sixties invented themselves as “national” literatures. Politics have remained a topic of debate since independence, in sub-Saharan Africa and particularly the Maghreb, within the Francophone area.27 The sensitive problem of “colonial divisions” and of the relations between Metropolitan France and the overseas departments and territories, vestiges of the former colonial empire, still arises today. It is precisely

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within the historical, legal, and political framework of the French Republic that Caribbean cultures and literatures asserted themselves, for example. Thus, whatever the economic and social problems experienced by the citizens of the former colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and their families established on the mainland, the conditions for the production, preservation, and distribution of Caribbean literature are infinitely more favorable than for the literatures of Haiti or of sub-Saharan Africa. Given the precarious situation of the material preservation of manuscripts and documents in these countries, it has rarely been possible to produce studies on the genesis of postcolonial Francophone literatures before now. The creation by the Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts (ITEM in French) of the “Planète libre” (“Free Planet”) collection, published by the CNRS in partnership with different publishers and institutions, offers a one-of-a-kind opportunity. Associated with a research team working on the Francophone manuscripts of authors such as Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Ahmadou Kourouma, Sony Labou Tansi, Aimé Césaire, and Albert Memmi, it is both a cultural heritage and a critical project. Created in Paris, but with the support of the Francophone University Agency (l’Agence universitaire de la francophonie), the project provides an important critical and theoretical contribution to reflections on the invention of national literatures. On the heels of the volume dedicated to the complete works of Jacques Roumain in the “Archivos” collection under the sponsorship of the AUF, a volume of the works of Léopold Sédar Senghor and the first two volumes of those of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, including the unpublished journal Les calepins bleus, have been published. In a way, the goal is to establish a “Pléiade” collection of postcolonial Francophone authors, including a reflection on the genesis of their texts. I believe that no comparable enterprise exists in Anglophone postcolonial studies. The search for significant publications on the genesis of texts claiming to belong to postcolonial studies would be in vain. It is curious that the founder of postcolonial studies, Edward W. Said, has not been emulated in his fidelity to philology, in which he sees humanism capable of being critically turned against the West.28 It is precisely in the name of the humanist values inherited from Vico and transmitted by Auerbach (for whom he wrote the preface to the translation of Mimesis) that Said calls for the “decentering” of Western thought. In the Anglophone world, however, with Said being the exception, the history of the book and of publication dominates the critical field to the detriment of philology and, especially, genetic criticism.

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English Studies departments in France remain the privileged place for postcolonial research in the country, as shown by the number of publications, theses, seminars, and conferences that are explicitly situated in this field. For several years already academic positions have been regularly advertised in what is becoming an institutional “discipline” recognized by the 11th section of the National Council of Universities (le Conseil National des Universités) “English and Anglo-Saxon Languages and Literatures” under various (and successive) names: “Commonwealth Literatures,” “Literatures of the English-Speaking World,” and most recently “Postcolonial Literatures,” an expression which stimulates many discussions about the place to be given to Irish, Canadian, or Australian studies, for example. In the same way, the postcolonial is present in Iberian studies from the Americas and Portuguese-speaking Africa. Comparatists, through their familiarity with English- and Spanishlanguage literatures and the critical methods associated with them, sometimes act as “smugglers,” but to a limited degree doubtless due to the history of a discipline traditionally turned toward European cultures, as Gayatri Spivak ruefully remarks.29 However, genetic criticism is almost completely absent from the dynamic research conducted in these different institutions. One critic noted a “theoretical resistance to genetic criticism” on the part of comparatists, characterized by a “transcendental” conception of the text, a “textual idealism”: “the mobility of the genetic text does not lend itself well to comparisons, which require stable criteria,” considering that “this association of two critical perspectives is almost a contradiction in terms.”30 As happens in the universities of the Anglophone world, French Anglicists and comparatists oriented toward postcolonialism, with a few rare exceptions,31 keep their distance from textual genetics. The absence of postcolonial genetic criticism is logical; it deserves to be investigated, if we wish to promote research in this little-explored domain. Why, in fact, do Anglophone postcolonial theory and Francophone studies diverge on genetic criticism to this degree? What are the issues behind this difference in approach? How can this divide be surpassed?

Forgetting the Postcolonial Text Historians, political scientists, and sociologists, both American and French, interpret the hostility toward postcolonial theory in France as a repression of the colonial past of the Republic. This repression is said to be the source of a “colonial fracture.”32 Beyond the work of memory that society as a whole must accomplish, it is also necessary for literary theory

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to examine the meaning of this blind spot, which relates to the epistemological and methodological foundations of a critical discourse on literature and its relation to History. Anglophone criticism, while rightly denouncing the “critique of postcolonial reason”33 which French thought did not take far enough, should perform its own critique. We should consider the Franco-American misunderstanding via the “contrapuntal” method proposed by Said. From across the Atlantic, a blind spot in postcolonial theory must be located in relation to the text. The rejection of postcolonial theory in France is accompanied by a certain denial of the text on the other side of the Channel and across the Atlantic. The “French exception” in postcolonial studies is mainly due to a different relation to textuality. “Francophonists” criticize “postcolonialists” in the interest of the text considered in its historicity and its materiality (that is, in its different states, from the earliest scenarios and drafts to the edition assumed to be “definitive”). Postcolonial theory across the Atlantic clearly breaks with the “structuralist” principle of the “closure of the text,” on which is based the deconstruction practiced by Paul de Man in conjunction with Derrida. Thus it is the legacy of New Criticism through “close reading” which is being challenged in favor of an approach which places the work back within its social, political, and ideological history. In reality the situation is more complicated than it might seem because postcolonialists also practice deconstruction in their own way (Spivak translated De la grammatologie). Postcolonial theory restores the place of the author, of socio-historical reality, of cultural referents, of a readership, etc. in an “external” criticism of the works. However, one of the principal objections made about postcolonial theory by French historians was its “towering” vision of History, which is not based on a sufficiently precise and contextualized reading of documents and texts. For the Algerian war, which Robert J.C. Young correctly makes the founding moment of post-structuralism in his key work: Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction,34 French historians such as Benjamin Stora, without a doubt the best expert on the question and himself born in Oran,35 criticize analyses which tend to examine colonial Algeria’s different communities on the same level, neglecting the context. Algerian Jews, like Jacques Derrida, are thus brought together under the category of the “colonized,” just like the “indigenous” Muslims, or a small elite of “French Muslims.” Sometimes the history of the Maghreb in its entirety is assimilated to that of Algeria, without regard to the specificities of Tunisia and Morocco. How can one confuse the situations of Albert Memmi, Jacques Derrida, Edmond El Maleh, and a fortiori, Khatibi? Transatlantic distance can certainly foster critical

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distance and a certain “decentering,” but the generalist point of view in postcolonial theory often leads to an inadequately contextualized reading which tends to obscure the specificity of the work. In any case, the text ends up in the background, taking a back seat to the referent in a socio-critical and ideological-inspired reading. Interdisciplinary, anchored in cultural studies and the social sciences, postcolonial studies can thus seem quite remote from the text in its formal and a fortiori genetic dimensions. Much more than its literariness, it is the ideological, socio-historical, or socio-political contexts which take precedence, without explicitly addressing the creative process. When the imaginary is directly taken into account, it becomes the object of a thematic approach more than a stylistic one. Consulting the table of contents of the great classics of postcolonial theory in English, as well as the innumerable textbooks, introductions, lexicons, dictionaries, or student anthologies, one can only be struck by the absence of critical notions relative to the text. Historical forms and genres: tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric poetry—apart from the novel, described according to subgenres likes the historical novel or the “coming-of-age” novel—are only rarely the subject of specific reflection. There are certainly essays on the narrative structure of the novel, on tragedy, or, more recently, on autobiography in the postcolonial context, but the vast majority of publications in the field simply seem to ignore issues of genre, to which that of gender (“genre”) is preferred.36 Even when Spivak, Bhabha, and their disciples, readers of “French theory,” approach the “postcolonial text,” it is to invoke, in Barthesian style, the Text in its broadest sense, beyond the work. It is quite significant that one of the rare articles dealing explicitly with “textuality” in postcolonial literature37 only summarizes “structuralist” concepts of the text based on Barthes, Kristeva, Althusser, or Derrida, without considering a possible specificity of the postcolonial text. More importantly, however, the authors give socio-political connotations to this word, which functions as a synonym of discourse (“discours”). The expression “postcolonial text” often means, metonymically, the discourse in which readers of Foucault advance to “archaeology.” Edward W. Said himself, although given his literary background closer to texts than his followers, claims a debt to Foucault, even if in many respects he significantly veered from his ideas.38 His reading of orientalist texts, in particular those of Flaubert or Loti, of Kipling or Conrad was placed under the sign of “colonial discourse” by which the West “invents” the Orient, according to the famous expression. Said, too, tends to level the differences between texts when placing newspaper articles, the essays of Gobineau and Renan, the

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travel journals of Flaubert or Fromentin, and the stories Salammbô and Aziyadé, on the same level, overlooking form. Quoting The Archaeology of Knowledge, but in fact based mostly on The Order of Discourse, he ultimately associates Orientalism with a globalizing discourse which, as such, exercises power. “Orientalism ‘writes back’ at an imperial discourse from the position of an oriental”: opposing this imperial discourse is a “counter-discourse,” according to anthropologist James Clifford39 who cites Salman Rushdie’s famous words used again by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin in their founding essay The Empire Writes Back.40 Despite the quasi-formulaic invocation of the “postcolonial text,” in practice Anglophone criticism, unlike recent Francophone criticism, does not take into account the “verbal material” of the text, the textuality of literary works.

Toward a Genesis of Postcolonial Texts This indifference to the text and to its genesis, a mirror image of French indifference to postcolonial theory, reveals different, intersecting— not to say antagonistic—traditions. It is the status of the text and the pretext in critical practice and theory which has given rise to this FrancoAmerican misapprehension. Not only postcolonial studies, but Anglophone literary studies on the whole have shown limited interest in the genetic approach, suspected of being “untheoretical.” The situation comes from a misunderstanding arising, again, from the lack of translations, as is the case for postcolonial thought in France.41 Anglo-Saxon criticism, steeped in “French theory,” tends to deem genetic criticism outmoded and obsolete, like the resurgence of positivist philology, in the name of the primacy of the “theoretical,” again alluding to “French theory.” It is the irony of Franco-American history to have to re-play on the other side of the Atlantic the controversy between Roland Barthes and Raymond Picard. Paradoxically, genetic criticism was withdrawn as an act of loyalty to Barthes at the same time that a “Barthes” team was being formed within the ITEM in Paris. The French Barthes, however, is not the American Barthes—or at least not the Barthes of postcolonial studies. Literary theory textbooks for students, very popular in universities throughout the Anglophone world,42 seem to bypass the genetic approach, while featuring substantial chapters on other methods also imported from European traditions, such as sociology or literary psychoanalysis. The words “genesis” and “genetic” (“genèse,” “génétique”) are not listed in any glossary or dictionary of literary theory, not even in recent ones. In the Anglo-Saxon world the genesis of postcolonial texts has not produced

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much research so far. Even Anglophone researchers working on Frenchlanguage literature in renowned centers of learning, and often with prestigious publications—Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds, Liverpool, Duke, Cornell, Toronto, etc.—are not very attentive to the genetic dimension of texts, although they are experts on French theory, which they know “from the inside,” unlike postcolonialists from the Anglophone field. As a counter-example, however, I will mention the research of the team from Francophone Postcolonial Studies,43 both the journal and the association, directed by Charles Forsdick, David Murphy, Jane Hiddleston, Patrick Crowley, and Andy Stafford.44 At the University of Leeds, the latter is doing research on the genetics of Barthes’ oeuvre and postcolonial literature with particular attention to their relation to photography. One of the principal contributions, due in large part to the Franco-British “entredeux” position of the FPS, has been to bring together the ideological and socio-political approach inherited from cultural studies with French-style genetic criticism. This research benefits from the legacy of cultural studies developed in Birmingham and British universities (especially in northern England) under the decisive influence of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall, whose work up to now has not been well disseminated, but which is beginning to be translated.45 This critical tradition, widespread in the Anglophone world, and based on a sociological reading, developed by the thinking of Marx, Lukacs, Adorno, and Benjamin, puts the political and the social at the center, and considers the intellectual background of authors, using perspectives which intersect with socio-criticism, similar to Claude Duchet in France. It is this same method of investigation and analysis at the crossroads of genetic criticism and socio-political theory which presides over the shift toward postcolonial studies and which, in addition to French theory, refers extensively to Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall. Edward Said, in dialogue with Barthes, gave vibrant homage to Raymond Williams who, even more than Foucault, played a determining role in his education. Thus Andy Stafford, for example, equipped with the critical tools of genetic criticism and cultural studies approaches the study of Francophone writers in subSaharan Africa and the Maghreb. Naturally those who have set anti- or postcolonial struggle at the center of their writing hold privileged positions, such as Sembène Ousmane for Senegal, Driss Chraïbi for Morocco, Aziz Chouaki and of course Frantz Fanon for Algeria. A broader and more flexible approach to cultural studies, crossed with Barthesian semiotics, can remain the locus for publications on photography, which often treat the social and political setting of the artistic project.

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Thus, as shown by the example of the “smugglers” from Francophone Postcolonial Studies, the situation is far from desperate and the “two solitudes” are not inevitable. Certain essential elements of postcolonial theory, which unconsciously or unwillingly involve processes of writing to some degree, might enhance genetic perspectives and in this way advance the convergence of approaches separated by their critical traditions, particularly in their relation to the text. Not much would be required to restore depth to postcolonial texts and their pre-texts at the very heart of an expanded postcolonial theory.

The Conditions for a Genetic Approach to Postcolonial Texts Elleke Boehmer, who directs a postcolonial seminar at Oxford, devotes the first chapter of her synthetic work, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995), regularly republished as a “classic,” to “writing in the Empire,” under the title “Imperialism and Textuality.” In presenting the continuum from social life to literary production, she shows that the Empire, before producing the great novels of Defoe, Kipling, or Conrad, was literally established on texts which constitute colonial discourse: decrees, administrative or legal acts, and textbooks or religious texts in addition to correspondence, chronicles, and newspapers given to the “natives” to read in the process of teaching them European languages, but also, and most importantly, to metropolitan residents, raised with these omnipresent texts which shaped their consciousness and imaginary. Even maps, which play a decisive role in colonial geopolitics, contribute by their toponymy to a “textualization” of colonial expansion. The idea that colonial domination is first of all a “textual” fact naturally calls for research and the study of colonial archives, in view of analyzing creative processes, on the basis of a textual continuum which is precisely the focus of genetic criticism. Valentin Mudimbe, in line with Said’s Foucauldian thesis in Orientalism, relates this “colonial library” to the domination of Africa.46 On a second level, reading and analyzing literary works published by writers born or working in the colonial system, metropolitan residents, or “natives” assumes establishing a direct link between unique writings and the substrate of imperial textuality which preceded and prepared the birth of literary texts. Kipling, E.M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, and Conrad write their stories in a context created, beyond literature, by a network of colonial texts, whose very structures theory strives to identify. This contextual study, in which the socio-political and ideological

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dimensions play a capital role, is not fundamentally different from that done, in a limited sense, by literary history dedicated to English (or French) literature. The most important methodological contribution of postcolonial theory is the coverage of authors and works which do not seem directly connected to the colonial or imperial situation. Thus postcolonial theory deconstructs works of fiction which allude only indirectly to the colonial situation by the play of actions, events, and characters connected by their personal history to the socio-economic structures of Empire. Edward W. Said shows this indirect relation in Culture and Imperialism (1993) using the novels Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and Vanity Fair as examples. These novels, which constitute the “canon” of English literature, are inseparable from the Empire from which they emerged. For postcolonial theory, Kim, and the speech promoting the teaching of English in India delivered in 1835 by the historian Macaulay, an ideologue of imperialism, are part of the same continuum of colonial (or postcolonial) texts, but it is the textuality of colonial discourse in all its forms, including the most “prosaic,” which comprises the womb of these works, built on a book-oriented memory of the Empire. It therefore seems necessary to return to the raw material— administrative and commercial documents, images and photographs, oral narratives and witness accounts, press, correspondence, personal diaries, etc.—on which the postcolonial writer bases his own creative work. These documentary sources mobilized by critics to interpret the works of the Western literary “canon”—Flaubert, Dickens, and Melville—are no less indispensable for reading and interpreting postcolonial texts. The inventory and study of the creative process which transmutes the raw material into a literary work is the work of genetic criticism. On a third level, postcolonial criticism, by developing concepts of intertextuality and hypertextuality, draws on Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Genette; thus strategies of reversal and the subversion of motifs, forms, and genres, achieved through plays on parody and the rewriting of classic texts in the Western “canon” such as The Tempest,47 Robinson Crusoe, Jean Eyre, or Heart of Darkness48 are described and analyzed. These analyses do not aim solely to reveal intertextual relations with source works, but the social discourse upon which they are founded in the writing process. Through Shakespeare, re-read and rewritten by Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, or Aimé Césaire, Defoe by J.M. Coetzee, Charlotte Brontë by Jean Rhys, or Conrad by V.S. Naipaul, theorists bring to light the genesis of social discourse. Here again the study of intertextual operations is likely to intersect with a genetic approach to literary texts.49

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Thus a simple change in perspective makes it possible to gather the elements which pertain to the writing process itself, as certain critics do for the Francophone corpus with Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, for example.50 The genesis of the creative process includes interviews with authors, which are a major genre for postcolonial studies, as shown in interviews by journalists or critics with Walcott, Soyinka, Rushdie, or others.51 The genesis of works and more generally, the creative process interests publishers less than the social situation, political choices, or the relation to the audience. Interest in the question of the language chosen for writing, of bi- or multilingualism, or of diglossia, so important in postcolonial theory,52 is more likely to be treated in depth by examining the genetic material as has been done for Conrad, Beckett, Nabokov, or Celan as well as Cioran. The work accomplished recently at ITEM by the editors of the great Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo,53 is taking precisely this direction. In an unpublished thesis54 on the bilingualism of the Malagasy poet, Claire Riffard, basing her research on genetic documents, was able to show that Rabearivelo’s poetry, far from consisting of a simple translation from Malagasy to French and vice versa, was written in a simultaneous, that is to say a truly bilingual, manner. The recourse to textual genetics would prove of great interest for numerous postcolonial writers who are considered to be bilingual. Discussions around the choice of Kenyan novelist Ngugi was Thiong’o55 to give up English and write in Gikuyu, his native language, like the opposite choice made by the Nigerian Chinua Achebe regarding Igbo,56 would certainly be clarified by the study of different states of the texts, from drafts to different editions. Genetic documents offer material of inestimable value for the linguistic and stylistic analysis of phenomena such as various polyphonies and contact with languages, a dominant trait of postcolonial literatures, in French and in other languages: regarding the presence of a dialectal Egyptian Arabic “subtext” for Albert Cossery, of Creole for Edouard Glissant as well as Derek Walcott, and of Urdu for Salman Rushdie. In this sense much is to be expected from the research on Ahmadou Kourouma for “Planète libre,” in relation to a critical examination of the novelist’s statements on the writing of Malinké in French. All of these elements are an active part of genetic criticism in the broad sense, although postcolonial critical thought considers almost exclusively the text published in its presumably definitive state. They should play a part in bringing postcolonial theory closer to genetic criticism. Bringing these together will restore to works their full textuality by replacing them in their evolution. Genetic criticism, by giving depth to postcolonial texts, has the potential to bring postcolonial Anglophone

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theory closer to Francophone studies—another way of reuniting the continents of the “Black Atlantic” (“l’Atlantique noir”) studied by Paul Gilroy.

Summary The very idea of a genetic criticism seems foreign to postcolonial theory in the Anglophone world. A persistent misunderstanding divides postcolonial criticism of the Anglo-Saxon world and French criticism, still often hostile to an interdisciplinary approach which is considered too general and, especially, ideological. Without a doubt the relation to the text is one of the major reasons for this misunderstanding. Neglecting, even forgetting the textuality of literary works, postcolonial criticism overlooks this aspect to access the ideologies and socio-political situations which governed the birth of the text. Even as it criticizes genetic criticism for its lack of “theory,” postcolonial criticism establishes a number of elements capable of developing a reflection on the genesis of literary works: the textuality of the colonial universe seen as “discourse,” processes of intertextuality and rewriting, and the role of bilingualism and of languages in general in the definition of a specific corpus, etc. These elements, central to postcolonial theory, have the potential to be reconsidered in terms of genetic criticism. The convergence of genetic criticism and postcolonial studies, in addition to its heuristic significance, allow for a critical examination, from a distance, of the contributions of postcolonial theory and thus bring the traditions of Francophone criticism closer to Anglophone studies.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Daniel Brant, a Ph.D. student in French at the University of Illinois, and Yvette Smith, Ph.D., for their fine work in translating and editing this essay from French into English.

Notes 1

Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes (1945), McClelland and Stewart, 2008. See Régine Robin, Mégapolis, Stock, 2008. 3 Charles Taylor/Amy Gutman, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, Princeton University Press, 1992. 4 Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, Penguin Books, 1994. 2

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Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale, Paris, PUF, 1999. 6 Particularly by Jean-Pierre Durix, one of the pioneers of postcolonial studies in France. See for example: J-P. Durix, Genres and Postcolonial Discourse. Deconstructing Magic Realism, Macmillan, 1998. 7 “Passages. Ecritures francophones, théories postcoloniales”, Littérature n°154, June 2009. 8 Edward W. Said, L’Orientalisme. L’Orient créé par l’Occident, Seuil, 1980 ; Culture et impérialisme, Fayard, 2000 ; Culture et résistance, Fayard, 2004 ; Humanisme et démocratie, Fayard, 2005. 9 Jean-Loup Amselle, L’Occident décroché. Enquête sur les postcolonialismes, Stock, 2009. 10 Jean-François Bayart, Les Etudes postcoloniales, un carnaval académique, Karthala, 2010. 11 The conference proceedings were published with the title: La Situation postcoloniale, edited by Marie-Claude Smouts, Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2007. 12 La Découverte, 2009. 13 This is the title of the first part of the work cited earlier to which English scholars Denise Coussy and Alexis Tadié and comparatist Jean-Marc Moura have contributed. 14 Such as Editions Amsterdam (for G.Spivak, S.Hall, R.Williams, D.Chakrabarty, P.Gilroy) and the journal Multitudes, Editions Payot (for H.Bhabha, A.Appadurai), Le Serpent à Plumes (for E.Said) or Actes Sud (for W.Soyinka and E.Said), who have done remarkable and courageous work publishing and distributing translations of Anglophone postcolonial, cultural studies or “radical Left” authors. 15 On the reception of H.Bhabha in France and the theoretical problems posed by postcolonial translations, see Claire Joubert’s very suggestive article: “Théorie en traduction: Homi Bhabha et l’intervention postcoloniale”, Littérature n°154, op.cit., pp.149-174. 16 Nonetheless, a translation of On Late Style (2003) is expected in Fall 2012 from Editions Actes Sud. 17 Op.cit., p. 90. 18 Aijax Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Verso, 1992. 19 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, University of California Press, 2001. 20 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies. A Materialistic Critique, Routledge, 2004. 21 Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris, Pour une littérature-monde, Gallimard, 2007. 22 On this point, readers are referred to the conclusion of Les Littératures francophones. Questions, débats, polémiques, P.U.F., 2010, pp. 213-223. 23 Michel Beniamino, La francophonie littéraire, Karthala, 1999 ; Dominique Combe, Poétiques francophones, Hachette, 1995 ; Samia Kassab-Charfi (ed.), Altérité et mutations dans la langue. Pour une stylistique des littératures francophones, Louvain-la-Neuve, Academia Bruylant, 2010. 24 On this point, see Patrick Crowley and Jane Hiddleston’s “Introduction”, Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form (Liverpool University Press, 2011), following a conference organized at the University of Oxford in 2009.

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See for example the critical edition and commentary of Adam et Eve, by Adrien Pasquali, accompanied by the full diplomatic transcript of the text and a detailed study of its genesis (two volumes, Paris, Minard-Lettres modernes, 1993 and 1997), and more recently the remarkable edition of the novels under the direction of Doris Jakubec (two volumes, Paris, Gallimard, Pléiade, 2005) which here also is supported by impressive documentation submitted to the university, and developed in tandem to produce a monumental edition of the complete works for the Editions Slatkine. These new genetic perspectives have resulted in successful work (for example, that of Rudolf Mahrer: “Quand Ramuz remonte le courant – réécriture des romans en vue des Oeuvres complètes”, Genesis 27, 2006, pp.59-71. 26 On the role of publication in national literatures, see Louis Hay, La Littérature des écrivains, questions de critique génétique, Corti, 2002, pp.374-375 ; on Goethe and German literature, as well as the work of Michel Espagne, De l’archive au texte, recherches d’histoire génétique, Paris, P.U.F., 1998, or also Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, Philologiques III : Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature nationale ?, Paris, MSH, 1994. 27 On the Afro-Caribbean debate, launched after the controversy between Césaire and Depestre on the idea of “national poetry” set out by Aragon in Les Lettres nouvelles in 1955, the « Contribution au début sur la poésie nationale » by Senegalese poet David Diop in 1956 should be consulted. In particular, see Notre Librairie n°83, April-June 1986: « Littératures nationales: mode ou problématique ? » and n°84, July-September 1986 : « Littératures nationales : Langues et frontières », as well as the essay by Hamidou Dia : « Poésie africaine et engagement, en hommage à David Diop », Acoria, 2003. 28 On philology and genetic criticism: Daniel Ferrer, “Critique génétique et philologie : racine de la différence”, Genesis 30/10, pp.21-23. 29 Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003. 30 William Marx, “Les résistances théoriques à la critique génétique » in Paul Gifford, Marion Schmid (Ed.), La création en acte. Devenir de la critique génétique, Amsterdam-New York, Rodopi, 2007, p.60. 31 Daniel Ferrer, who directs the Joyce team at the ITEM is one of the more active theorists of genetic criticism, but his work in the postcolonial field restricts itself to the question of Ireland, placed under the banner of colonialism since the wellknown volume jointly edited by T. Eagleton, F. Jameson and E.W. Said: Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 32 Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Sandrine Lemaire (Ed.), La Fracture coloniale. La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial, Paris, La Découverte, 2005. 33 To cite the title of Gayatri Spivak’s book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999. 34 Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford, Willey-Blackwell, 2001. Chapter 28, entitled “Passages. Ecritures francophones, théories postcoloniales” (pp.135-148), has been translated in issue n°154 of Littérature, June 2009. Spearheaded by Martin Mégevand, this issue, in proposing

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the first translations in French of the texts of Robert J.C. Young and of Elleke Boehmer, strives to build bridges between Anglophones and Francophones. 35 See Note 33 of Young’s article in the French translation, op.cit., p.145. 36 This conclusion was the source of the conference and, later, the publication of the volume Postcolonial Poetics: Form and Genre (2011) (see reference supra). 37 Schwarz in Loiseau, E.Bergmann, N.Fraitat (Ed.), Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 38 Dominique Combe, “Postcolonial Theory, Philology and Humanism. The Situation of Edward Saïd”, Littérature n°154, 2009. 39 The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1988, p.266. 40 Recently translated into French: L’Empire vous répond, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2011. 41 One of the rare introductory works on genetics in English: Genetic Criticism. Texts and Avant-Textes, edited by Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, University of Pennsylvania, 2004. 42 Louis Hay observes that, unlike French poetics, “there will be no encounter with New Criticism or Textlinguistik” (La Littérature des écrivains. Questions de critique génétique, Corti, 2002, p.45). 43 Created in 2002, the FPS continues the work of the ASCALF (Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French). 44 In addition to the issues of the journal, see for example: Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, Francophone Postcolonial Studies. A Critical Introduction, Arnold, 2003, or Patrick Corcoran, The Cambridge Introduction to Francophone Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2007, or Jane Hiddleston, Postructuralism and Postcoloniality, Liverpool University Press, 2010. 45 Recently published: Translations of Identités et Cultures. Politiques des Cultural Studies (Editions Amsterdam, 2007) by Stuart Hall, and of Culture et matérialisme by Raymond Williams (Les Prairies ordinaires, 2009). 46 Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988. 47 See Helen Gilbertand Joan Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, Routledge, 1996. 48 See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto and Windus, 1993. 49 On intertextuality in genetics: “Génétique, intertextualité et histoire littéraire », interview of Antoine Compagnon by Pierre-Marc de Biasi and Anne HerschbergPierrot, Genesis 30, op.cit., pp.55-57. 50 This is the case for the comparison of successive editions of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal by Lilian Pestre de Almeida: Aimé Césaire Une saison en Haïti, Montréal, Mémoire d’encrier, 2010. Even if this thinking, which demonstrates the decisive influence of Césaire’s stay in Haiti on the genesis of the poem, does not refer directly to the achievements of genetics, it is nonetheless close to it in spirit, since a critical and genetic edition for the collection “Planéte libre” is underway, directed by James Arnold, with the help of Daniel Delas, one of the rare critics to adopt the point of view of a poetry scholar regarding Césaire’s poetry.

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See for example: F. Jussawalla and R.W. Dasenbrock, Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, University Press of Mississippi, 1992, which contains highly significant interviews with major writers such as Anita Desai, and Nureddin Farah, or J.Wilkinson (eds.), Talking with African Writers, James Currey and Heinemann, 1992. 523 See for example Alastair Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism, Routledge, 1998; Ismail S. Talib, The Language of Postcolonial Literatures, Routledge, 2002; Bill Ashcroft: Caliban’s Voice. The Transformation of English in Post-colonial Literatures, London, Routledge, 2009. 53 Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Oeuvres complètes I, Serge Meitinger, Liliane Ramarosoa and Claire Riffard (Ed.), CNRS-Présence africaine, “Planète libre”, 2010. 54 Claire Riffard, Mouvements d’une écriture : la poésie « bilangue » de PresqueSonges et Traduit de la nuit, de J.J. Rabearivelo . Research directors : Garnier, X. and Ramarosoa, L. Paris XIII, 2006, 634 p. 55 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, James Currey, 1986. 56 Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, New York, Doubleday, 1975.

CONTRIBUTORS

Chong J. Bretillon is Lecturer at Baruch College, The City University of New York (CUNY) Lia Brozgal is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French and Francophone Studies of the University of California, Los Angeles Dominique Combe is Professor of French and Francophone Literature at École Normale Supérieure, Paris (France) Roxanna Curto is Assistant Professor of French in the School of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Iowa Yasser Elhariry is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College Zsuzsanna Fagyal is Associate Professor in the Department of French of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Luc Fotsing Fondjo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia (Canada) Jeanne Garane is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of South Carolina Thomas A. Hale is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emeritus of African, French and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University Jim House is Senior Lecturer in French in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds (England)

388

Contributors

Evelyne Leffondre-Matthews is a Doctoral student in Francophone cultural studies and an Instructor at the Department of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University Françoise Lionnet is Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, and Gender Studies in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles Véronique Maisier is Associate Professor of French and Francophone literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Southern Illinois University Brian McLoughlin is a Ph.D. student in Francophone literature in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University Robert Miller is Lecturer in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia (Canada) H. Adlai Murdoch is Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of Romance Languages at Tufts University John Nimis is Assistant Professor in the Department of African Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Gloria Onyeoziri is Professor of African and Caribbean Literatures in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia (Canada) Alison Rice is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame Kamal Salhi is Reader in Francophone, Postcolonial and African Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds (England) Awa Sarr is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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Siobhán Shilton is Senior Lecturer in the Department of French of the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol (England) Servanne Woodward is Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Western Ontario (Canada)

INDEX academia, 216, 219, 220, 221, 222, 225, 226, 227, 228, 292, 303 Academia, 228 acculturation, 62, 141, 201, 263, 352 aesthetics, 21, 25, 55, 69, 70, 132, 140, 181, 224, 225 africanité, 9, 280, 288 agency, 28, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 311 Agency, 201, 301, 373 Ahmad, 51, 346, 360, 370 alienation, 124, 135, 139, 140, 275, 281, 282, 283, 284 ambiguity, 146, 164, 168, 204, 239, 270, 350, 351 antillanité, 9, 280, 288 Antilles, 185, 257, 258, 340 archipelago, 24, 107, 109, 112, 210, 337, 340 art, 2, 51, 124, 126, 127, 131, 137, 141, 142, 170, 175, 181, 187, 235, 285, 301, 313, 314 Arts, 7, 8, 9, 38, 109, 126, 216, 219, 226, 229 artwork, 132 assimilation, 3, 56, 140 banlieue, 128, 133, 135 Belonging, 263, 273 binary, 24, 26, 55, 56, 63, 135, 170, 194, 199, 204, 212, 253, 348, 354 Caribbean, 2, 3, 9, 25, 26, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 260, 261, 269, 270, 275, 276, 280, 282, 283, 286, 287, 288, 292, 301, 303, 322, 330, 331, 367, 368, 373, 384, 385 cinema, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59, 63, 71, 199, 208, 324 circularity, 156

class, 19, 24, 25, 149, 240, 244, 267, 315, 320 classroom, 173, 303, 340 colonization, 24, 55, 56, 175, 181, 192, 193, 195, 203, 333, 334, 337, 340, 342, 353, 358 colony, 24, 169, 267, 298, 302, 340, 349 community, 7, 8, 33, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 58, 62, 71, 73, 105, 107, 109, 116, 117, 118, 119, 125, 194, 212, 217, 218, 219, 220, 224, 225, 248, 252, 254, 255, 260, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266, 283, 292, 293, 300, 301, 303, 304, 318, 321, 331, 334, 337, 339, 351, 355 Comores, 105, 109, 120, 122, 123 Comparative Literature, 367, 368 conversation, 39, 66, 70, 128, 143, 144, 222, 255, 256, 260, 263, 264, 266, 293, 347 cosmopolitan, 14, 24, 99, 105, 117, 148, 336, 337, 340 creole, 4, 5, 95, 256 créolité, 9, 49, 88, 231, 258, 280, 288, 343, 344 Creolity, 335, 336, 337, 338, 340 creolization, 4, 5, 25, 73, 157, 211, 343 cultural studies, 7, 369, 370, 376, 378, 383 decolonization, 8, 192, 198, 240, 303, 337, 339, 342, 349, 355 demonstration, 109, 128 department, 26, 95, 216, 219, 220, 221, 222, 226, 227, 228, 292, 302, 303, 304, 342, 347, 359, 367, 371, 372, 374 departmentalisation, 267

Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity departmentalization, 2 departments, 220 diaspora, 8, 53, 70, 107, 108, 124, 128, 130, 133, 134, 242, 264, 267 difference, 3, 5, 6, 7, 20, 83, 98, 125, 135, 139, 140, 141, 190, 238, 241, 263, 325, 359, 374 diversity, 4, 6, 15, 36, 96, 117, 125, 129, 139, 140, 252, 280, 287, 295, 324, 335, 342, 350, 352, 356, 371 elite, 32, 298, 306, 309, 313, 315, 317, 318, 320, 322, 375 Emancipation, 215 empire, 20, 24, 25, 26, 190, 212, 220, 241, 294, 297, 302, 303, 308, 311, 370, 372 epistemology, 25, 223 essentialism, 263 ethnic, 2, 3, 4, 14, 135, 200, 202, 207, 211, 212, 287, 310, 312, 316, 321, 322, 323, 324, 331, 332, 350, 353 ethnicity, 6, 26, 53, 118, 267, 331 ethnography, 164, 167, 201, 203 exchange, 57, 126, 128, 129, 132, 135, 139, 141, 152, 293, 311 exclusion, 4, 6, 24, 41, 56, 127, 135, 136, 139, 218, 220, 225, 229, 275, 277, 279, 332, 335 filiation, 74, 147, 277, 280 film, 2, 7, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 70, 71, 72, 76, 92, 93, 97, 101, 102, 120, 170, 227 folklore, 170, 180, 325 freedom, 25, 38, 40, 70, 110, 113, 114, 134, 135, 237, 242, 277, 302, 313, 315, 355 Frenchness, 3, 4, 6, 7, 105, 119, 340 gender, 9, 24, 26, 53, 62, 205, 211, 238, 242, 370, 376 genealogy, 26, 211, 331 genetic criticism, 371, 372, 373, 374, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 384 geography, 54, 84, 108, 210, 218, 219, 222, 223, 225, 226, 292

391

globalization, 24, 25, 52, 114, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 216, 239, 280, 337, 341 Guadeloupe, 241, 245, 253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 272, 277, 287, 289, 302, 373 hierarchy, 51, 210 hip-hop, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111, 115, 117, 120 home, 18, 54, 55, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 69, 72, 73, 81, 86, 99, 107, 110, 112, 114, 125, 131, 132, 140, 149, 158, 190, 205, 208, 236, 241, 242, 284, 288, 297, 322 homogeneity, 6, 189, 227, 280 hospitality, 66, 75, 151, 152, 155, 157, 341 hybridization, 9, 211, 240 ideology, 5, 17, 23, 24, 33, 47, 70, 227, 318, 331, 338 immigrant, 2, 3, 9, 87, 105, 108, 110, 112, 115, 116, 119, 126, 127, 133, 134, 135, 138, 141, 187, 190, 191, 192, 234, 275, 279, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287, 288, 330, 332 immigration, 2, 10, 54, 62, 99, 105, 110, 115, 120, 122, 124, 125, 126, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 151, 190, 191, 192, 195, 216, 331, 334, 341, 343 independence, 2, 65, 108, 178, 194, 200, 204, 208, 210, 212, 220, 224, 298, 309, 310, 313, 315, 317, 318, 320, 350, 351, 354, 355, 372 indeterminacy, 26, 34 Indian Ocean, 2, 8, 15, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 105, 120 installation, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142 integration, 6, 15, 105, 111, 124, 133, 140, 192, 202, 203, 207 intersection, 3, 15, 188

392 Intertextuality, 88, 144 irony, 18, 25, 26, 114, 164, 166, 177, 206, 263, 265, 303, 351, 377 isolationism, 187, 188, 189, 191, 194 landscape, 6, 32, 52, 60, 139, 148, 152, 154, 156, 199, 207, 208, 221, 228, 235, 239, 318, 339, 369 legacy, 17, 23, 111, 270, 311, 312, 326, 331, 357, 375, 378 lineage, 271 linguistic, 2, 3, 5, 8, 14, 15, 25, 42, 43, 48, 85, 91, 124, 132, 149, 151, 157, 168, 169, 177, 220, 223, 229, 252, 253, 254, 255, 284, 292, 295, 304, 309, 310, 315, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 327, 332, 334, 335, 336, 337, 339, 340, 341, 349, 350, 352, 359, 367, 381 Maghreb, 2, 3, 55, 62, 74, 125, 126, 127, 135, 137, 208, 211, 318, 326, 349, 352, 353, 354, 355, 357, 361, 362, 363, 367, 372, 375, 378 Maghrebi, 9, 10, 54, 55, 56, 57, 62, 75, 124, 125, 126, 127, 133, 134, 135, 141, 142, 348, 349, 350, 352, 353, 355, 360, 361, 362 marginal, 21, 147, 223, 286, 368 Marseille, 2, 9, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123 Martinique, 5, 240, 257, 289, 298, 301, 303, 373 media, 51, 52, 56, 77, 106, 107, 109, 112, 124, 126, 131, 137, 142, 143, 227, 228, 313, 318, 319, 320, 321, 324, 326 memory, 4, 37, 38, 74, 81, 142, 166, 167, 170, 178, 235, 236, 264, 266, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 278, 284, 285, 286, 335, 337, 374, 380 metaphor, 26, 47, 49, 57, 99, 153, 248

Index métissage, 95, 102, 340, 341 migration, 7, 108, 121, 189, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 210, 211, 216, 330 minority, 4, 5, 6, 203, 239, 297, 300, 315, 322, 324, 326, 331, 334, 339 mobility, 221, 275, 324, 374 modernity, 17, 21, 24, 25, 167, 198, 202, 204, 237, 321, 327, 341 Modernity, 75, 143, 364 montage, 129 multilingualism, 157, 311, 328, 381 multinationalism, 216 music, 5, 7, 8, 22, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111, 117, 119, 126, 130, 132, 141, 208, 217, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229, 250 narrative, 273 nationalism, 8, 53, 67, 194, 195, 204, 210, 212, 318, 322 nationality, 6, 9, 34, 40, 88, 108, 242, 323, 325, 330, 332 nationality’, 323 negritude, 41, 193, 340 Négritude, 344 North Africa, 4, 137, 198, 310, 313, 314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 353, 361 North African, 9, 118, 198, 199, 202, 211, 313, 315, 317, 318, 319, 321, 346, 347, 352, 354, 357, 361 opacity, 25, 165, 255 orality, 9, 22, 148, 165, 166, 170, 171, 177, 178, 249, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269, 270, 271 paradigm, 99, 222, 358, 359 peasant, 148, 149, 203, 204 photograph, 178 poetics, 17, 25, 27, 52, 73, 141, 155, 156, 335, 337, 339, 360, 371, 385 postcolonial, 374 postcolonialism, 8, 16, 24, 242, 311, 372, 374

Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity postmodern, 3, 53, 370 postmodernity, 48, 49 power, 9, 16, 17, 24, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 44, 48, 53, 55, 81, 83, 87, 99, 164, 165, 166, 169, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 190, 191, 194, 206, 223, 238, 239, 248, 261, 262, 264, 285, 294, 304, 309, 312, 316, 317, 318, 320, 322, 324, 337, 338, 349, 357, 360,377 profanation, 275, 276, 277, 279, 282, 283 race, 3, 5, 6, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 82, 86, 87, 88, 176, 240, 242, 281, 370 racism, 3, 82, 110, 111, 286 rap, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 120, 121, 250 repression, 201, 209, 210, 212, 248, 374 rupture, 53, 234, 237, 275, 277, 278, 281, 287 rural, 128, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208, 317, 321 sabir, 204 segregation, 62, 202, 206 shanty-town, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211 social class, 113 socio-criticism, 378 subaltern, 4, 9, 56, 140, 168, 173, 174, 281, 370 Subaltern, 51, 255, 259, 369 sub-Saharan Africa, 2, 3, 32 Sub-Saharan Africa, 310, 322, 367, 372, 373, 378 territorial, 210, 336, 338 textuality, 10, 18, 22, 34, 52, 147, 375, 376, 377, 379, 380, 381, 382, 385 topography, 84, 217, 219

393

town, 59, 74, 118, 120, 248, 349 transculturation, 4, 125, 126, 139, 140, 141 trans-culturation, 211 transgression, 63, 277 transnationalism, 8, 53, 129, 151 transparency, 25, 26, 165 trauma, 58, 195, 267, 268, 269, 273 travel, 9, 18, 59, 125, 132, 139, 169, 224, 232, 233, 234, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243, 333, 348, 377 trickster, 9, 164, 165, 176, 177 universalism, 20, 25, 44, 46, 192, 195, 218, 220, 225, 332, 348, 370 urban, 54, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 317 video, 57, 106, 111, 113, 117, 118, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 140, 142 violence, 9, 17, 23, 38, 56, 69, 107, 110, 135, 236, 237, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 266, 267, 268 voice, 9, 58, 59, 67, 70, 72, 91, 92, 106, 112, 115, 131, 136, 155, 156, 190, 220, 233, 237, 243, 247, 250, 251, 255, 260, 267, 268, 272, 276, 283, 311 working class, 3, 112, 117, 118, 203, 208 world-identity, 187, 188 writing, 14, 15, 25, 26, 33, 46, 49, 71, 80, 81, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 97, 111, 150, 151, 154, 158, 159, 165, 166, 167, 168, 177, 181, 201, 220, 223, 238, 242, 243, 249, 253, 260, 264, 267, 269, 270, 274, 276, 277, 278, 279, 284, 285, 288, 324, 330, 331, 332, 333, 335, 342, 346, 349, 360, 361, 368, 372, 378, 379, 380, 381