Читать книгу A Companion to African Literatures - Группа авторов - Страница 27

It is precisely this point of tension between African creators who work in French and a Francophone cultural industry eager to claim them as its own that has solicited renewed debate and discussion around francophonie’s usefulness as a category. Many writers continue to embrace French, declaring it a global language that is no longer tied primarily to the former colonial métropole. The 2007 literary manifesto entitled “Pour une littérature‐monde en français” (“For a World Literature in French”), signed by forty‐four “Francophone” authors, takes aim at the very use of that term. Following what they call the “Copernican revolution” of 2006, when five of France’s prestigious literary awards went to non‐European authors, the manifesto declared that it was time to stop perceiving France as the center of cultural activity in French. To call this a Copernican shift is to adopt the very imagery of the French rayonnement culturel in order to challenge its assumptions. The manifesto asserts that, in terms of cultural influence, the Francophone world can no longer be conceived through a heliocentric model, whereby France would serve as the bright sun at the center. To the contrary, cultural influence in the French‐speaking world is now indisputably multidirectional.

Although most writers can agree with the manifesto’s call for greater attention to and authority for non‐European authors, some are less sanguine about the possibility of liberating authors from a complex linguistic and colonial heritage simply by declaring French a global language. If the notion of world literature may indeed help authors to reimagine their place without appearing overly beholden to the national culture of a former colonizer, does the term resolve the material restrictions holding back the circulation of a true “world literature”? In his foundational book What is World Literature? David Damrosch addresses just this point by highlighting the obstacles to translation that maintain certain literatures, and particularly those that do not conform to shared notions of what literature from certain places should be, in a subaltern status (Damrosch 2003). In the case of African literature, Damrosch points out the difficulty authors can face if their works do not engage with themes regarded as essential to making any literature truly and characteristically “African” for a global readership. Damrosch gives the example of the work of Mbwil a M. Ngal, a writer from Zaire (the present‐day Democratic Republic of Congo) whose Giambatista Viko: ou, Le Viol du discours africain (Giambatista Viko, or the Rape of African Discourse, 1975) presents a narrative about an African professor who seeks to write the next great African novel by combining the western novelistic form with the secrets of African orality (Damrosch 2003, 113–117; Ngal 1984). What ensues is a biting critique of all sides of the anticolonial and nationalist debates of the 1960s and 1970s that spares no one and therefore serves no one politically. As a result, the novel and Ngal’s work have remained vastly understudied and untranslated, an example that incites Damrosch to ask how we can aspire to speak of a world literature worthy of the name when novels such as Ngal’s remain neglected and inaccessible.

In addition to concerns of translation and circulation, certain authors have memorably cast doubt on the ability of the French language to carry a politically enfranchised African literary voice. In a polemic addressed to his African peers entitled “Ecrire sans la France” (“Writing Without France”), Cameroonian author Patrice Nganang calls upon his fellow writers to take up a more frontal combat against French cultural heritage, the need for which is “autant inscrite dans la langue qu’il utilise que dans l’expérience qui a forgé sa conscience” (as inscribed in the language they use as in the experiences that have forged their conscience). Nganang casts doubt on the possibility of achieving cultural and intellectual liberation within the French language, stating that although this “pas de deux étrange” (strange pas de deux) between African authors and the former colonizer’s culture, “s’il débouche à la fin sur le chant énergique, sur la parole forte et libérée de l’écrivain, au fond, sincèrement, ne le libère pas du tout” (though it finishes on an energetic song set to the empowered and liberated voice of the writer, in the end, truthfully, does not liberate him at all) (Nganang 2004). Responding to this text, the author Alain Mabanckou challenges the view according to which any literature penned in the language of the colonizer is condemned to subordination. Mabanckou asks: “Être francophone, cela empêcherait‐il d’être un écrivain?” (Does being Francophone mean that one cannot be a writer?). Mabanckou, a signatory of the “World Literature in French” manifesto, then underlines his view of a global framing of the French language and its literature: “N’avons‐nous pas encore compris qu’il y a longtemps que la langue française est devenue une langue détachée de la France?” (Have we not yet understood that the French language has long become a language detached from France?) (Mabanckou 2005). Whether or not such detachment is conceivable, Mabanckou points out that below the surface of Nganang’s argument is a demand that African authors shun French cultural heritage in favor of a notion of African authenticity whose very origins lie in colonial domination, and whose criteria were themselves responsible for the most egregious forms of postcolonial violence by independent governments seeking to “re‐Africanize” their culture and people.

Mabanckou’s stance reflects an eager defense of African authors’ ability to write and be read as fundamentally cosmopolitan creators of literature. This argument resists the tendencies of readers of African literature, and indeed of the publishing industry in general, to approach works by African authors through a restricted lens that seeks out a clear, autobiographical relationship between the author and his or her work. Mabanckou circumnavigates these expectations by focusing on the talent of the writer to create multi‐faceted fictional worlds and to do so without any obligation to reflect urgent global injustices of the present. Why, one might ask, would such an imposition be placed systematically on African authors though not on European or North American ones? And why, Mabanckou further asks, can an African author who happens to hail from one of the former French or Belgian colonies not write in French without appearing to pay homage to the former métropole? In his novel Black Bazar (Black Bazaar, 2009), the narrative’s main character, nicknamed “Fessologue” (Buttologist), is a Congolese man living in Paris, who exists not to reflect the hardships of an immigrant African community, but rather as an asserted presence and fact of life in the urban vibrancy of the capital. The novel does not delve into the tribulations of his existence but depicts the humor and flamboyance of an enthusiast of “la S.A.P.E.” (Société des ambianceurs et des personnes élégantes), a kind of African dandy figure, living among the well‐established African community of contemporary Paris.

Mabanckou’s view on the possibilities of a “global French” literature resonates with that of writers in different contexts, for example the defense of “Afropolitanism” as described by Taiye Selasi, an author of Ghanaian and Nigerian descent, who characterizes her identity as local within the context of certain cities, rather than as native to a single country (Selasi 2005). Among Francophone African writers, this cosmopolitan identity is more fitting for a contemporary generation of migrant authors who are not limited to writing about their home countries but also create fictions doubling as commentaries on French, European or North American society. Contemporary African authors having worked in this perspective include the Cameroonian Calixthe Beyala or the Congolese‐born French writer Wilfried N’Sondé. Writing some of their works against the backdrop of the underprivileged outer‐city neighborhoods of urban France, these authors reflect what has been called an “Afropean” generation of creators. In the vein of such writers, Léonora Miano’s novel Blues pour Elise (Blues for Elise, 2010) breaks the mold of the stereotypical politically engaged African author by focusing on African women in Paris, not as adrift migrants struggling for acceptance, but as locals of the city who participate in and contribute to its cosmopolitan vibrancy.

Cosmopolitan reframings of an Afropean literature do not preclude the notion of political engagement, which continues to hold a great deal of currency. For many contemporary authors, writing about Africa from a politically engaged perspective is less an act of duty than one of conviction. They do not contend, as Mongo Béti and writers of an earlier generation once did, that authors must write primarily to defend Africa or to call the former colonizers to task for misdeeds of the past and present. They appear even less concerned with defending the quality of an “authentic” African literature and its right to exist. Rather, they unflinchingly assert their place on an equal footing within a global literary constellation of authors. Their work highlights the error of discussing contemporary novels about Africa as addressing specifically African problems. If authors such as Léonora Miano and Alain Mabanckou may also set their novels on the continent, it is not to address issues they portray as specifically African, but rather to examine them as part of a broader human story. Indeed, any depiction of human and historical realities on the continent is inextricably linked with global narratives of civilization, modernity, and development. This is as true in Miano’s poetic novel La saison de l’ombre (Season of the Shadow, 2013), an imagined retelling of a population decimated by the demands of an emerging transatlantic slave trade, as for In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo, Inc. (2014), the tale of a young Ekonda who leaves the forest for contemporary Kinshasa to “faire de la mondialisation” (do globalization), against a backdrop of police‐state corruption, NGO initiatives, and rising Chinese industry and investment.

Perhaps among the most salient aspects of contemporary positions of political engagement by conviction is the nuanced stance authors take in relation to their own role as writers. Recent works on the treatment of historical memory, for example, continue to address the hidden episodes of a colonial past of violence, deconstructing official historical narratives without attempting to erect similarly univocal ones in their place. Authors such as Max Lobe, whose novel Confidences (2016) retraces the “secret war” of independence in Cameroon, recognize the wealth of historical and cultural heritage available in non‐written forms. His account of discovery, as a Cameroonian‐born writer living in Switzerland for many years, seeks to resurrect certain historical truths about the assassination of anticolonial leader Ruben Um Nyobe. It also gives voice to the character Ma Maliga and her experiences of the independence movement, weaving a multi‐temporal and multi‐vocal history from below. Throughout the novel, Lobe foregrounds the incongruity of his own position as the investigator‐novelist. Despite having been born in Cameroon and despite speaking the Bassa language, he is seen by his countrymen as an outsider, acculturated to a western mindset that limits and determines his understanding of the country’s past and present. His position betwixt and between Cameroonian and European identities complicates Lobe’s attempts, as a character in his own novel, to draw a clear‐eyed and critical assessment of the current injustices taking hold in the country.

Such an approach to historical memory evinces a will to uncover hidden acts of political oppression, while also reflecting on the possibility (or impossibility) of adopting a historical methodology without tripping over its attending historiographical pitfalls. One of these pitfalls, the predominance of the western archive in creating historical record and legitimizing authority, is evoked directly by Patrice Nganang’s novel Mont Plaisant (2011; Mount Pleasant, 2016), in which a fictional researcher who, like Lobe, is from Cameroon but lives abroad, this time in the United States, conducts research into the life of an elderly woman whose long life story includes becoming the 681st wife of Sultan Njoya. The novel is at once a historical fiction about life among this royal court in the early twentieth century and a reflection on coexisting but often disharmonious approaches to reconstructing history. An academically trained historian committed to the rigors of her field, the narrator struggles to depart from official history, critiquing her own position as one who is there to enforce the history and authority of dusty archives. Meanwhile she is confronted with the personal narrative of Sara, who declares her body an archive that contains and incarnates the very historical knowledge she seeks while also defying the limits of the academy’s knowledge‐making.

Lobe and Nganang are engaged writers in that they uncover new histories while deconstructing lies taken for truth about Africa’s past and present. However, they do so in a vein that is both politically engaged and self‐critical. Their works do not seek to define the contours of the authentic African novel, but they do include expectations, anxieties, and oversights related to notions of authenticity within their fictional worlds. In the end, the contemporary African authors we tend to read in the field of Francophone studies do not see themselves or their work within the strict confines of African cultural production. When Fiston Mwanza Mujila writes, in his debut novel Tram 83 (2014), about the fictional account of a city‐state that has revolted and declared its independence from a country that is not specified but could be taken for today’s Democratic Republic of Congo, it is clear that the sense of cosmopolitanism he portrays, detached from a deep sense of strictly national identity, is not specifically African but a phenomenon one finds in major cities throughout the world today, with increased divisions between the urban and rural driven by continued influxes to cities. It is as impossible to say that this is a strictly African story as it is to define what it means to be a specifically African story or author. This is a principal conviction of today’s creators as they resist expedient labels such as African, postcolonial, Francophone, and authentic.

As Nganang asks in his own Manifeste d’une nouvelle littérature africaine: pour une écriture préemptive (Manifesto for a new African literature: for a preemptive writing, 2007), calling to task an oversimplifying body of critical writing about African literature: “Au fond, est‐il possible de lire la littérature africaine, moins à partir de son inscription mimétique dans les réalités du continent, les géographies nationales, ou la conscience de ses lecteurs vrais ou potentiels, qu’à partir de son enracinement dans la vérité” (In the end, is it possible to read African literature less according to its mimetic inscription in the realities of the continent, its national geographies, or the consciousness of its real or potential readers, and more according to its rootedness in truth?) (Nganang 2007, 11). In so framing his appeal to a new approach to reading African literature, Francophone or otherwise, Nganang reminds us that language and, by extension, literature do much more than simply reflect a given reality. So must African writers aspire to more than representing to their readers what we might then come to understand as the given “truth” of the African continent. By contrast, the truth of which Nganang speaks proves far more universal, acknowledging the historical particularities of the past while allowing the African author to respond to it in active dialogue with the reader, history, and the world.