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This Guinean irresistibly seduces us. His exuberance is overflowing with poetry, a poetry that rises from a spring—this despite, it should be recognized, a few clichés and here and there, a questionable choice of words. It is as if he could barely sit still, carried away again and again by the breathless rhythm of violently colored village and pastoral scenes. He has chosen to move in a world where different modalities confuse themselves at will, for our reading pleasure. If he shows a certain tendency toward garish romanticism and a certain verbosity, it is that he is paying the ransom for an unexpected kinship with . . . Tibulus! I have forgotten to mention his sensibility, a sensibility that is perhaps clumsily exploited, but that is perhaps his greatest asset. Camara Laye is an authentic poet.

Nevertheless, there are people who will be disappointed by his book. And first and foremost, us, of course; we young Africans who have lived the same adventure as Laye, give or take a few details; we, for whom the promising title and the family name of the author made us believe for a second that this would be the great book about our childhood—that we still await! (Despite Camara Laye and his brilliant qualities). Additionally, for those who have read Richard Wright’s pathos-ridden Black Boy, there will be an inevitable comparison between the two books, and the monstrous absence of vision and depth of the Guinean’s book will be evident. Particularly for those who, in the final analysis, believe that the century demands of the writer—believe that it is a categorical imperative—that he refuse gratuitous art, that he reject the idea of art for art’s sake.

To be honest, what is at stake here is much less the book itself than the mentality of which it is the nauseating product. Wright—since the title of Laye’s book also represented a kind of challenge—refuses to make the least concession to the public, presents the problems at hand in all of their crude reality, avoids clichés, anything superfluous, anything naïve. Laye, for his part, is perfectly content to use the most harmless and easiest—which is to say the most lucrative—kind of folklore; he erects the cliché into an artistic approach. Despite appearances, he insists on showing us a stereotyped image—and therefore a false one—of Africa and of Africans: an idyllic universe, the optimism of overgrown children, stupidly interminable festivities, circus-act initiations, circumcisions, excisions, superstitions, Uncle Mamadou, images whose recklessness is only equaled by their unreality. It is true that Laye touches on subjects that might have given his story value; unfortunately, he only does so from a vantage point that is borrowed from some kind of “Tales from the Bush and Forest” or “Mamadou and Binéta Have Grown Up.” One can only pity him when he speaks of the totem, of spells, of genies. In sum, there is nothing in this book that a European petit bourgeois won’t have heard of on the radio, in some article he might run into anywhere, or any tired old program playing on “France Soir.”

On the other hand, Laye closes his eyes to the most crucial realities, precisely those that have always been hidden from the public here. Is this Guinean, my fellow African, who is, or so he suggests, a lively and attentive boy, saying that he never saw anything but a peaceful, beautiful, and maternal Africa? Is it remotely possible that he didn’t once witness the slightest atrocity on the part of the colonial administration?

Finally, Black Boy is not a testimonial—my God! When I think of the conclusions to which some of the people I know will come . . .—despite the ambitious (I mean tantalizing!) title.

Also, an African good sense that condemns a lack of intellectual integrity demands that Camara Laye redeem himself. This should be an easy task for someone so obviously talented. We await him at the next turn, which is to say his next book.

A.B. [MONGO BETI]

NOTES

1. Here I’m especially thinking of a Monsignor Augouard, then a simple priest, who declared to his mother in one of his numerous letters that, now that he was living among the Blacks, he was absolutely certain that they were the descendants of Ham—an ancestry that was apparently highly unfortunate under the pen of this particular prelate. And indeed, he recognizes in the next sentence that he has no proof to back up this assertion; nevertheless, he insists that these are the real descendants of Ham. Today, Europe no longer finds it necessary to justify its African adventure in so paltry a manner.

2. I have given myself permission to cite these titles written before the war, such as Batouala, and Karim. My thinking here is that even though these books don’t belong to the period or the field that I had given myself as an object of study, they might be of use to the reader curious about African literature.

3. Translator’s note: This quotation is in fact from Pierre Joseph Proud-hon.

4. I know that there will be no end of people to accuse me of a bias, of lacking in objectivity, of seeing only one facet of colonization, without even bothering to look at the other: its benefits. Indeed, European rhetoric, especially French rhetoric, demands that every reality have two sides: an ugly one and a beautiful one. Nevertheless, if we examined the war from this perspective, wouldn’t we risk justifying it? That being said, it is true that Hitler’s regime had already done this. In my opinion, the war and colonization are connected in that respect, as in many others: they cannot be judged according to the methods of argumentation taught in the last year of high school; colonization, like war, is entirely ugly or entirely beautiful; finding them both ugly and beautiful at the same time is but a vulgar self-justification.

5. Lettres françaises is a literary and cultural journal heavily trending toward the Left. From 1953 to 1972, its chief editor was the communist Louis Aragon, and at the outset the paper was heavily funded by the French Communist Party. Conversely, Le Figaro littéraire trends heavily to the Right.

6. Published by the Editions Gallimard.