University of Oregon

Of Postcolonial Entanglement and Durée: Reflections on the Francophone African Novel

Author(s): Pius Adesanmi
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Summer, 2004), pp. 227-242
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
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PIUS ADESANMI

Of Postcolonial
Entanglement and Durde:
Reflections on the
Francophone African Novel

Introduction: Afropessimism and temporality

One fundamental consequence of the tragic failure of the postcolonial nation-
state in Africa has been the elaboration of discursive positions underpinned by
sentiments of despair and hopelessness. With one developmentalist thesis after
another crumbling under the weight of civil wars, famine, poverty, social inertia,
and political stasis, it has become the norm in various Africanist disciplines to
homogenize the continent's postcolonial space as one uniform site of dysfunc-
tionality.' Underpinning the reasons often proffered for this pervasive Afropes-
simism is the belief that "the African condition"2 can only be understood from
the perspective of what Simon Gikandi calls "the schemata of difference" (455),
difference, that is, from the teleological ethos of the Occident. Thus, an entire
discursive symbology has evolved to place the temporal frame of the African
postcolony within a largely unproblematized sign of negativity. This is the diffi-
culty of speaking "rationally"about Africa that Achille Mbembe evokes in the
introduction to On thePostcolony.
In an effort to transcend both Afropessimist representations of the African
condition and the Eurocentric paradigms that underlie some of them, Patrick
Chabal andJean-Pascal Daloz propose in AfricaWorksan analytical grid designed
to reveal the "continuities in their historicity."Although their study focuses on
articulations of agency in the informal infra-Statecontexts of African postcolonies,
Chabal and Daloz are able to show that Afropessimism devolves from scholarly
practices and discursive formations that are too often fixated on the tragedy of
Africa's colonial past and the imperfect modernity of the nation-state it engen-
dered. The trouble with such positions is that they often underestimate the dyna-
mism of the present, subsuming its independent vitality within the causal
1For a summary of various attempts to grapple with the postcolonial condition of Africa and the
Third World in the last four decades, see Tejumola Olaniyan's introduction to the special issue of
Callalooon postcolonial theory.
2 The phrase is commonplace in African Studies as a catch-all for whatever is believed to have
happened to Africans as a result of colonialism.

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COMPARATIVE
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/228

instrumentality of a colonial past that is made to function as an exegetical grid

for every aspect of the postcolonial condition. Chabal and Daloz, on the other
hand, while acknowledging the significance of the past, do not downplay the
vitality of a present marked by the interweaving of Africa's colonial and post-
colonial realities.
If the need to overcome the passe inclinations of Afropessimism also bespeaks
a certain anxiety regarding temporality, as one clearly sees in Africa Works,it is
because every attempt to privilege what Fredric Jameson calls "the ontology of
the present" (215) carries the risk of unsettling altogether the authority of the
African past. That is, if, asJameson suggests, "ontologies of the present demand
archeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past"-the reference to Edouard
Glissant's well-known notion of vision prophitiquedu passe ("the prophetic vision
of the past") (227) is obvious-what then happens to the past of subject peoples,
a past that requires precisely the sort of creative engagement that Jameson dis-
misses? How does one proceed to valorize this past without making the present
its prisoner? This dilemma was largelyresponsible for the initiallylukewarmattitude
of African (ist) scholarship to postcolonial theory, a body of knowledge that has
never quite been able to overcome the semantic import of its problematic prefix.3

Achille Mbembe, postcolonial temporality, and durie

Achille Mbembe is one African scholar who has engaged the anxieties of post-
colonial temporality in a manner that accounts for the overlapping of past and
present while maintaining their distinct functionality. His seminal book On the
Postcolonyengages the modalities of self-fashioning in the African present, modal-
ities determined at once by local issues and, more generally, by the status of
Africa as a subaltern Other of the West. By theorizing the political structure of
the African present as a postcolony,Mbembe inevitably affirms the politics of tem-
porality, since a postcolony is, of necessity, related temporally to what had been
a colony:
The notion "postcolony"identifies specifically a given historical trajectory-that of societies recently
emerging from the experience of colonization and the violencewhichthe colonialrelationshipinvolves.
To besure, thepostcolonyis chaoticallypluralistic;it has nonethelessan internal coherence... thepostcolonyis
characterizedbya distinctivestyleof political improvisation,bya tendencyto excessand lack of proportion,as
well as bydistinctivewaysidentitiesare multiplied,transformedand put into circulation.But the postcolony
is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place,
constitute a distinctive regime of violence. (102, emphasis added)

Although scholars as diverse asJudith Butler, Tejumola Olaniyan, and Fernando

Coronil have disagreed with many of Mbembe's formulations regarding the nature
of power and the articulations of resistance in the African postcolony,4 he has

3Critical engagements with the temporal implications of the postcolonial have yielded a litera-
ture too vast to be cited exhaustively here. The most commonly cited essays include Arif Dirlik's
"The Postcolonial Aura,"Ella Shohat's "Notes on the Postcolonial," Anne McClintock's "The Angel
of Progress," and Aijaz Ahmad's "The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality." For specific African cri-
tiques, see Osundare and Williams.
4 Various reactions to Mbembe's well-known essay "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony" are col-
lected in Public Culture5.1 (1992).

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 OF POSTCOLONIAL
ENTANGLEMENT
&DUREE/229

nevertheless been able to foreground the temporal coherence of the postcolony

as a phase that has been worked over by imperialism but whose socio-political
dynamics are constantly shaped and mediated by multiple, overlapping modes
of self-fashioning in which the past and the present function relationally:
By age is meant not a simple category of time but a number of relationships and a configuration of
events-often visible and perceptible, sometimes diffuse, "hydra-headed,"but to which contempo-
raries could testify since very aware of them. As an age, the postcolony encloses multiple durfes
made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate
one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement.(14)
Of the three key terms-age, duree,entanglement-Mbembe proposes for semi-
otizing the postcolonial, dureeconstitutes a unit that allows continuously unfold-
ing fragments of experience to crystallize into normative phenomena, even within
the overall context of temporal progression. Consequently, dureebecomes the
site in which the constitutive experiences of a given present can be grasped in a
synchronic fashion. The entanglement of multiple duries over a period of time
in turn offers the possibility of a diachronic apprehension of phenomena.

The Duree and Francophone African Fiction

Building on Mbembe's formulations, I want to suggest in what follows that it is

possible to theorize the thematic evolution of the Francophone African novel as
an entanglement of three distinctive duries:the power duroe,the large corpus of
novels that focus on what Mbembe calls "postcolonial relations of power" (103);
the feminist duroe,the explosion of women's writing in the late 1980s; and the di-
asporic durie,the new generation of diasporicAfricannoveliststhat emerged in France
in the early 1990s.' I will argue further that while each durie is governed by a
discursive ideological coherence that makes it possible to place a vast number of
novels in the same current, the three dureesnevertheless manifest considerable
overlaps and interpenetrations that would render rigid divisions unworkable.
Reading three decades of Francophone African textual production within such
a thematic grid allows us to examine how issues such as generational affinity and
gender have impacted collectively or differentially on a broad range of works.
Francophone Africa is of course far from a homogeneous literary, cultural, or
political space. Indeed, the multiplicity and diversity of experiences that colonial
political structures such as the Afrique Occidentale Frangaise (AOF) homog-
enized for administrative and political purposes have re-emerged with a consid-
erable resonance within the postcolonial dispensation. Furthermore, because
these new realities have been largely subsumed within the strictures of nation
and nationalism, there has been an increasing tendency in Francophone African
texts to articulate identities as national literatures.
While I remain sensitive to the pertinence of locale and the dangers of unqual-
ified generalization, I will nevertheless employ the trans-local, trans-national para-
digm of Francophone Africa to underscore the possibilities that the approach I
5 The regularity with which these writers stage Paris as a site of migrancy, exile, and alienation has
earned their novels the critical designation "mouvance de la migritude"; see Jacques Chevrier's
review of Jean-Roger Essomba's UneBlanchedans le noir (NotreLibrairie147 [2002]: 66).

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 LITERATURE
COMPARATIVE /230

outline here offers for assessing the ways in which texts belonging to various
national literatures have transformed spatial strictures and boundaries in their
responses to the failed postcolonial African state, the question of patriarchy, and
the deracination, displacement, and disarticulated identities imposed on writers
from different Francophone African countries by virtue of their common inser-
tion into a homogenizing, metropolitan site.6
The entanglement of the three durees-and the consequent need to avoid
reifying them as separate entities-is demonstrated by a novel like Calixthe Beyala's
Le petit prince de Belleville,which straddles the feminist and the migritude durees.
Similarly, Aminata Sow Fall's L'ex-perede la nation would dissolve any rigidly con-
structed boundaries between the power and feminist durees.I will therefore deploy
the continuities inherent in Mbembe's theory of entanglement in such a way as
to signal a radical departure from the approach to Francophone African literary
evolution we encounter in Georges Ngal's Cr&tionet ruptureen litteratureafricaine:
La notion de rupture ainsi entendue sera etendue, dans nos analyses, a la th6matique, a la structure
de l'intrigue, au sujet du roman, au ton, au regard, a l'esth6tique romanesque. C'est ainsi que l'on
parlera de "rupture thematique," de "rupture de sujet de roman," de "rupture de ton," de "rupture
de structure romanesque," d'une "esthe'tiquede la rupture"... Ces ruptures sont 6troitement liees
A la conjonction historique dont elles sont une sorte de miroir. Les discontinuites ou ruptures
historiques, en effet, &clairentles ruptures constat6es au plan de la creation. (8-9)
Conceived thus, the notion of rupture will be extended, in our analyses, to themes, plot, novelistic
subject, tone, point of view, and novelistic aesthetics. We shall consequently be speaking of "the-
matic rupture," "rupture of novelistc subject," "rupture in tone," "rupture in plot," "aesthetics of
rupture". .. These ruptures are intricately linked to the historical conjuncture of which they consti-
tute a sort of mirror. In essence, historical discontinuities or ruptures reflect the ruptures that are
observable at the level of literary creation. (my translation)7

Indeed, Ngal's emphasis on "discontinuities" seems conspicuously out of place

in a postcolonial theoretical environment in which, as Ngugi wa Thiong'o puts it,
"seeking connections between things" (119) is the primary goal. I have chosen to
locate my analysis within the time span between Alioum Fantoure's Le cercledes
tropiques(1972) and Sami Tchak's Place des FHtes(2001), because the three de-
cades represent a watershed in the remarkable evolution of the novel in
Francophone Africa, a watershed characterized by the production of works whose
thematic and textual iconoclasm underscores a drive on the part of Francophone
African novelists to reinvigorate African textual practice.

The Power Duree

The foundational moment of what I will call a postcolonial power durie in
Francophone African fiction is located in Fantoure's Le cercledes tropiques,a novel
that signals a renewed engagement with power in the annals of Francophone

6 For
instance, while novels like Evelyne Mpoudi Ngolle's Sous la cendrelefeu and Regina Yaou's Le
prix de la revoltebelong to the national literatures of Cameroon and C6te d'Ivoire, respectively, both
novels articulate an anti-patriarchal resistance that cuts across national boundaries to expose the
predicament of African womanhood.
7 I have done my own translations from the French only in cases where there are no published
English translations.

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 ENTANGLEMENT
OF POSTCOLONIAL &DUREE/231

African fiction. In its early phase, Francophone African fiction was mainly con-
cerned with the revaluation or deconstruction of African history.8 Closely linked
to the texts of historical remapping are those that invest in what Abdul
JanMohammed calls a "manichean allegory" (59) spelled out in terms of key
binarisms: tradition/modernity, black/white, center/margin, Africa/Occident,
village/city.9 And while one can certainly find in the novels of Ferdinand Oyono,
Sembene Ousmane, and Mongo Beti a sustained confrontation with power,10Le
cercledes tropiquesconstitutes a major shift in the way that power is represented.
In this novel, as in many that come after it, colonial power and its brutalities
either become peripheral issues or are totally discarded. In their place we en-
counter the much more deadly political realities of the Francophone African
postcolony: monopartyism and presidents-for-life, coupled with the progressive
disempowerment of a disillusioned civil society. Indeed, in Le cercledes tropiques
we actually witness the moment that announces the birth of the postcolonial
power duree.Appalled by the already prevalent manifestations of political de-
bauchery and violent intra-African squabbles in the nascent "democracy"of Les
Marigots du Sud, the fictional setting of the novel, Sept-Saint Siss, a French po-
lice officer, offers a somber diagnosis of the African condition on the eve of the
country's political independence:
Docteur,il y a une chose quej'aurai apprisependantmon sejourd'une trentained'annbessous les
tropiques.C'estque vous etes plus cruels entre vous, que ne le serajamaisun toubabhvotrebgard.
Croyez-moi,le venin ne vient pas de l'exterieur.Vous sbcrbtezvous-memesvotre propre poison.
(116)
Doctor,there is one thing I'velearntduringthe thirtyyearsI've spent in the tropics.And that'sthat
you are more cruel to each other than any white man ever can be to you. Believe me, the poison
doesn'tcome from the outside.Youare secretingit yourselves.(115)
What in the wake of colonialism the white French officer identifies as the poi-
son within is the personalization of power and its concentration in the hands of a
single individual, the consequent ascription of anthropomorphic qualities to this
individual through a systematic fabrication of official narratives to which all sub-
jects must subscribe, and a homogenization of identity that results from the elit-
ist praxis of constructing the illusion of a common national destiny for disparate
ethnic nationalities that have been forcibly welded together by the colonial ma-
chine. This is the totalitarian incubus that characterizes the postcolonial land-
scape of much of Francophone Africa in the two decades following political
independence in the early 1960s. Its transformation into the dominant idiom of
fictional production, beginning with Le cercledestropiques,
constitutes a postcolonial
power durie that will span more than two decades in Francophone African fiction."1
8 Paul Hazoumb'sDoguicimi (1938) and Nazi Boni's Cripusculedestempsanciens(1962) are texts
that attemptsuch a historicalrevaluation,while the practiceof romanticizingAfrica'sprecolonial
historyis unsettledbyYamboOuologuem'sLedevoirdeviolence(1968).
9Seydou Badian'sSousl'orage(1963), Cheikh Hamidou Kane'sL'aventure ambigu;!(1961), and
AbdoulayeSadji'sMaimouna(1958) exemplifythis theme.
0 Here, we are concerned with the exactions and naked brutalities of colonial power as seen in
Oyono'sUneviedeboy(1956), Ousmane'sLesboutsdeboisdedieu(1960), and most of the novelsthat
constitutewhatis now regardedas the firstphaseof Beti'sexpansivenovelisticcareer.
" The list of novels that fall into this categoryis so expansivethat one cannot possiblyitemize
them exhaustively.Of interest,however,are SonyLabouTansi'sLa vie et demie,WilliamSassine'sLe

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One of the main characteristics of the African postcolony is that in the contest
for meaning between subjects and power the boundaries between what Althusser
calls "ideological state apparatuses"and the body of the Maximum Ruler are pro-
gressivelyblurred. This is the moment when, according to Mbembe, the postcolony
creates,through administrative and bureaucratic practices, its own world of meanings-a master
code that, while becoming the society's central code, ends by governing, perhaps paradoxically, the
logics that underlie all other meanings within that society; attempts to institutionalize this world of
meanings as a socio-historical world and to make that world real, turning it into part of people's
"common sense" not only by instilling it in the minds of the cibles,or target population, but also by
integrating it into the period's consciousness. (103)
Le cercledes tropiquesoffers a powerful representation of this process. Bohi Di,
first person narrator and protagonist of the novel, provides a heuristic analysis of
the process through which the body of Bare Koule, the Maximum Ruler, is trans-
formed into a "mastercode" that is consequently institutionalized and foisted on
the consciousness of a "targetpopulation":
Bar6 Koule ftait salue comme un nouveau dieu par ses compatriotes ... C'etait un sauveur, disait-
on, son mythe avait pris forme. Deja depuis quelques jours, les habitants ne parlaient que de sa
sagesse, de son eloquence, de son intelligence, de sa lutte contre les toubabs pour l'independance
des Marigots du Sud. Tout lui 6tait impute, tout lui etait donne, tout lui 6tait dfi. Il etait le maitre.
(126)
Bari Kouli's compatriots were hailing him as a new divinity... He was hailed as a saviour; he was
already creating his own legend. For days now the people had talked of nothing but his wisdom, his
eloquence, his intelligence, his struggle against the White Man to obtain the independence of South
Majiland. He was credited with everything, given everything, everything was due to him. He was the
Master. (127)
It is significant that the birth of Bare Koule's mythology coincides with the
event marking the birth of the nation: political independence from a European
colonial power. This scenario is reproduced in various shades and according to
different authorial temperaments in virtually all the power dureenovels published
after Le cercledes tropiques.It is in this sense that Fantoure's novel foregrounds the
ontological doubleness that constitutes the foundation of the African postcolony:
the institutionalized myth-narrative of the Maximum Ruler and the narrative of
nationalism were the two yarns that were woven together as the unifying identity
of the totalitarian African state, especially in Francophone Africa.
The novels of the postcolonial power dureeare political novels whose discur-
sive universe is governed by the systematic negation of the subaltern subject's
will/right to an egalitarian and participatory political agency. As evidenced by
the enforced subscription of the citizens of Les Marigots du Sud to "messie-koism,"
the quasi-religious state ideology of Bare Koulk, the political novel is also one in
which a "felonious state" (Bayart, Ellis, Hibou 1) turns its Weberian monopoly of
all instruments of legitimate violence into the production of subservient subjects.12

jeune hommede sable, Tierno Monenembo's Les crapauds-brousse,Boris Bobacar Diop's Le tempsde
Tamango,Henri Lopes's Lepleurer-rire,Patrick Ilboudo's Les vertigesdu trnne,Aminata Sow Fall's L'ex-
perede la nation, Sembene Ousmane's Le dernierde l'empire,Rachid Mimouni's Unepeine d vivre, Pius
Ngandu Nkashama's Le doyenmarri,Ahmadou Kourouma's En attendantle votedes bitessauvages,and
Emmanuel Dongala's Lespetitsgarconsnaissent aussi des itoiles.
12It should equally be noted that Francophone Africa's power durnenovels assemble all the em-
blematic typologies of the African nation-state as identified in African (ist) social science discourse:

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 &DUREE/233
OF POSTCOLONIALENTANGLEMENT

The entanglement of colonial and postcolonial temporalities is maintained in

the power dureenovel by the shadowy presence of France, whose representatives
function as "advisors."However, the main impact of the postcolonial power durde
on Francophone African fiction lies in a radical re-invention of textual idiom.
Because the socio-political realities feeding the imagination of the Francophone
African writer became so grotesque that textual and narrative strategies inherited
from Flaubert, Zola, and Stendhal quickly became inadequate, the power durde
novels typically employ the so-called postcolonial delinearization of narrative
temporality, a combination of strategies that includes the defamiliarization of
reality, the expansion of narrative space, the multiplication of voices to achieve
polyphony, the use of neologisms, other syntactic transgressions aimed at domes-
ticating the French language, and, most important, a recourse to African oral
discursive strategies, which have transformed the novels of the power dureeinto
avenues for apprehending the postcolony as a site of "excess"and "promiscuity,"
to borrow Mbembe's notions.

The Feminist Durne

The emergence of the authoritarian postcolonial African nation-state as a the-
matic durdein Francophone African fiction coexists uneasily with the growth of
an oppositional feminist dureein that literary firmament. It is now generally agreed
in African studies that colonialism combined with Africa's traditional patriarchal
ethos to effect a systematic subalternization of African women.'" Consequently,
the African state that emerged from this historical crisis was sexist and patriar-
chal. The entirely masculinist aura of the nationalist movements that gave birth
to the African state, coupled with the sexist dictatorships that followed it, en-
sured a phallogocentric continuum from which the question of women's voice
and agency were occluded (see Oyeronke).
Because of the imbrication of early modern African literature with the anti-
colonial and cultural nationalisms of the 1950s and the 1960s, African literature
came to mirror the patriarchal nature of African politics. Consequently, modern
African literature and its criticism were, in the early phase, an entirely male af-
fair. Women served merely as a textual foil for the romanticist exuberance of
writers yearning for a symbolic maternal succour.14 By the mid-1970s, the exclu-
sion of women from literary and political arenas had become worrisome enough
to occasion a feminist response from increasingly visible female intellectuals.
The manner in which they voiced their opposition to the malecentric African
literary process has been described appropriately by Irene Assiba D'Almeida as a
"prise d'ecriture" ("seizure of writing") in her book FrancophoneAfrican Women:

the one-party state in Lepleurer-rireand Unepeine a vivre;the patrimonial state in L'ex-perede la nation
and Lespetitsgarconsnaissent aussi desetoiles;and the warlord state in Allah n'estpas obligei.The failed,
collapsed, or crisis state is, of course, present in all the examples we have cited.
13 For an illustration of this view by African feminist scholars, see Oyeronke's The Invention of
Womenand Ogundipe-Leslie.
14 This explains the idyllic "AfricanMother" and "Mother Africa" tropes we come across in novels
like Camara Laye's L'enfantnoir and Abdoulaye Sadji's Maimouna.

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/234

DestroyingtheEmptinessof Silence.For Mary Modupe Kolawole (in Womanismand

African Consciousness),the advent of women's writing is a form of "voice throw-
ing," a literal translation of sani-baat,the traditional Senegalese feminist concept
in which women literally "throwin" their voices to counter, disrupt, or rupture a
patriarchal flow of discourse.
However, crucial as the initial women's texts were to the overall development
of African literatures in the 1970s, they did not collectively affect Francophone
Africa's postcolonial literary temporality on such a scale as to constitute a duree
in the sense in which I have used the term thus far. Rather, within the dominant
phallocentric flow of literary discourse, novels by writers such as Mariama Ba and
Aminata Sow Fall simply carved a space for the emergence of what would later
constitute an effective feminist durie in Francophone African fiction beginning
in the mid-1980s. By the mid-1990s insurgent textualities and radical remappings
of the modalities of self-fashioning in African fiction by a new generation of women
writers formed the basis for what Odile Cazenave has appropriately described as
an African "nouveau roman."15
Cameroon novelist Calixthe Beyala has distinguished herself as the chefdefile
of the feminist durie writers. She is the first Black writer ever to win, albeit in
contentious circumstances, the prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l'Acadimie
francaise,and she has constructed an expansive oeuvre-completing (on average)
one well-received novel per year since 1987, as well as several important essays.
Her works have even joined those of Mariama Bfain the highly insular canonical
sanctuary of the North American academy. Beyala is also the only feminist durie
writer to have attracted a book-length critical study (see Gallimore). In Beyala's
novels-especially those set in Africa and now increasingly considered as the first
phase of her careerl6-are assembled all the indices of the textual iconoclasm

15 See Cazenave'sFemmesrebelles: naissanced'un nouveau romanafricainaufiminin. The Francophone

African critical landscape also changed considerably to cope with the hermeneutic exigencies of
the new feminist durie. For instance, Arlette Chemain-Degrange's 1980 study of the textual repre-
sentation of African women in her magisterial Emancipationfiminine et roman africain was necessar-
ily a study of the representation of women in male-authored texts, given the paucity of texts written
by Francophone African women at the time of its publication. Six years later, Ngambika,another
critical milestone in the study of African women edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams
Graves, also offered, essentially, image studies of African women in male-authored texts. By the
1990s, however, studies able to focus entirely on female-authored texts began to appear. The jour-
nal NotreLibrairiedevoted two entire issues to Francophone African women's writing in 1994, thus
canonizing a feminist durie that includes such prominent writers as Regina Yaou, Angile Rawiri,
Philomene Bassek, Evelyne Mpoudi Ngolle, Tanella Boni, Vbronique Tadjo, Aminata Maiga Ka,
Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Fatou K6ita, Abibatou Traor6, Marie Ndiaye, and Catherine Ndiaye.
16 See
Coly's essay "Neither Here nor There: Calixthe Beyala'sCollapsing Homes." During the first
phase of her career, in which Beyala published novels like Tu t'appellerasTanga, C'estle soleil qui m'a
br-ile, and Assezel'Africaine,and the epistolary essay Lettred'uneAfricained sessoeursoccidentales(1995),
she articulated a politics of identity that clearly identified her as an "African"writer. Then she gradu-
ally shifted to a hyphenated position, and by the year 2000 she was identifying herself as an "Afro-
FranCaise,"as evidenced in the title of her second epistolary essay Lettred'une Afro-Francaised ses
compatriotes.Only five years separate the two epistolary essays, yet the shift in identity politics in-
scribed in the titles is significant. In the first letter the subject identifies herself as "anAfrican woman"
writing to "her Western sisters."In the second letter she identifies herself as "anAfro-French woman"
writing to "her compatriots," that is, French and not Cameroon nationals. At present, Beyala ap-
pears to be shifting gradually toward a wholly French identity. My discussion of Beyala is therefore
concerned only with the African phase of her curious, unfolding identitarian odyssey.

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 OF POSTCOLONIAL
ENTANGLEMENT
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and thematic transgressions that distinguish the works of the new novelists from
those of their predecessors such as Btaand Sow Fall.
A major difference between the texts of these two older writers and those of
Beyala's generation lies in their approach to the female and male bodies. The
pioneering female writers primarily focused on the debilitating social conditions
of African women in largely "autobiographical voices," to use Francoise Lionnet's
phrase. The cultural strictures surrounding the female body in much of tradi-
tional Africa make the female-and the male-anatomy a terraincognita,closed
to textual representation. The feminist dureewriters opened up this closed zone
and transformed it into a viable site of textual inscription. So gripping is the
textual engagement of the new feminist writers with the female body that
Gallimore has delineated what she calls a "discours du corps" (discourse of the
body) with specific reference to Beyala's novels ("Ecriture f6minine" 64). For
example, Tu t'appellerasTanga,one of Beyala's most widely critiqued novels, con-
tains riveting references to the genitals of teenage prostitutes as nauseating pub-
lic places where indolent men unload their burdens. However, it is in Beyala's
treatment of the male anatomy that the novel's feminism is most transgressive.
Beyala's strategy for deconstructing the dominant male body is to render it
"invisible"and leave the phallus exposed. The average male in Tu t'appellerasTanga
is indolent and hardly thinks; likewise, his phallus, the symbol of his so-called
superiority and pride, becomes the greatest impediment to his agency. The first
indication of this strategy is the information that Tanga, the novel's heroine, was
raped at the age of twelve by her incestuous father. Then follows a quick succes-
sion of male characters whose subjectivity is determined entirely by the dictates
of their sexual desires. Hassan, Tanga's boyfriend, is one such man, and Beyala
emphasizes his enslavement by denying him any tangible anchorage in the socio-
political fabric of Iningue, the novel's fictional setting. Even his initial meeting
with Tanga is structured in a manner that draws attention to his genitals:
J'ai fait la connaissance de Hassan par sesjambes. Je les vois encore gant~es dans un pantalon gris
frip6 a l'endroit du sexe et du ventre. (19)
I met Hassan through his legs. I can see them still, grey trousers fitting them like a glove, crumpled
around his penis and his belly. (10)
Once Hassan's penis has fallen within the spectrum of this narrative gaze, it re-
mains there and determines all his actions and utterances in the novel. Tanga, as
first-person narrator, serves as the authorial tool for maintaining Hassan in this
phallic prison through her perception and description of his every gesture:
II danse de la tite, allume un cigare, fume, toussote avant de monopoliser les mots, il ne parle pas
d'amour, il plaide le plaisir distill6 par son sexe. Il dit: "Jete ferai renaitre sous mes muscles." (27)
His head bobs around, he lights a cigarette, smokes, coughs before taking control of his words. He
doesn't speak of love but makes a plea for the pleasure his penis has exuded. He says: "You'll be
reborn underneath my muscles." (15)
Hassan is, however, not alone in inhabiting this phallic prison. Here, for exam-
ple, is the narrator's description of "the man with the wound,' one of Tanga's
mother's numerous lovers:
Et ce soir, la vieille la mere retrouve l'homme i la plaie dans la cabane que lui reserve Mama Terecita.
A
Et comme d'habitude, l'homme a la plaie l'attendra, allong&, le sexe l'air, sa cheville pourrie
pendant hors du lit, dans la ruelle. (82)

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /236

And tonight, mother old one will meet the man with the wound in the hut reserved for him by
Mama Terecita. And as usual, the man with the wound will be awaiting her, lying down, his penis in
the air, his decayed ankle hanging down in the space between the bed and the wall. (49)
It is significant that in the general aura of putrefaction woven around this char-
acter only his penis stands out as an unblemished evidence of his carceral exist-
ence, an existence which makes him privilege the indulgence of his sexual desires
over his body's nutritional needs:
La vielle la mere lui tend la viande et dit:
"Tiens."
"Apras,"repond-il. "D'abord la femme." La vieille la mere s'allonge ... IIla possade tres vite, tel un
insecte, il la libere, il gratte son ventre qu'il ajusqu'aux cuisses, il dit: '3'ai faim, tu m'as vid6." (82)
Mother old one is still holding out the meat to him and says:
"Here."
"Later,"he answers. "The woman first."
Mother old one lies down ... He takes her very quickly, like an insect. He frees her, scratches his
belly which hangs down to his thighs and says: "I'mhungry, you've emptied me out." (49-50)
Food comes after phallus in this man's world, and the physical disability of this
character provides further proof of Beyala's reluctance to accord her male char-
acters a subjectivity beyond the base instincts of their phalluses. Thus, when her
men are not physically challenged, they are socially and psychologically han-
dicapped (for example, Awono in Assize l'Africaine and M. Tichit in Maman a
un amant).
Beyala'stransgressiveuse of the body to unsettle the patriarchyis complemented
by other strategies that abound in the texts of her feminist durie contemporaries.
For example, in Angdle Rawiri's Crisetfureursdefemmes,lesbian sexual coupling
functions as a means of female assertion in a highly intolerant African context
that either silences any deviation from heterosexuality or considers it an un-
African, Western malady; similarly, in Abibatou Traore's Sidagamiepolygamy is
envisioned as a possible site of female bonding that could lead to the marginali-
zation of the dominant male.

The Diasporic Durde

Beyala and a good number of other Francophone African writers are currently
based in France. These writers, increasingly referred to as the third generation
of Francophone writers, have thematized identity and otherness as conditioned
by their location in the diasporic and/or exilic space. Because most of them were
born after 1960, the emblematic year of Africa's now truncated political inde-
pendence from Western European powers, they are, in the words ofAbdourahman
Ali Waberi, "les enfants de la postcolonie" (the children of the postcolony), and
they have produced a novelistic corpus that is expansive enough to be treated as
a durneon its own merit.
The treatment of the migrancy motif is, admittedly, not new in Francophone
African fiction." What has changed is the interactive scale of the global political
17Sembene Ousmane's Le dockernoir, Bernard Dadie's Un negrea Paris, Ferdinand Oyono's Chemin
d'Europe,Hamidou Kane's L'aventureambigu, and Ake Loba's Kocoumbo,I'tudiant noir have all en-
gaged this motif.

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 OF POSTCOLONIAL ENTANGLEMENT & DUREE/237

economy in which the new writers from Francophone Africa function. Arjun
Appadurai's description of the new global configuration as involving "interac-
tions of a new order and intensity" (1) becomes pertinent for literature to the
extent that it crystallizes the emergence of what Liselotte Glage and Rfidiger
Kunow call "anew inter-national and inter-cultural space of representation" gov-
erned by the thematics of home and exile, of deterritorialization and deracination,
of diasporic subjecthood and identity (7).'"
Sami Tchak's Place des fites is one of the most representative novels in the
diasporic durde.19 Unlike first wave Francophone texts by writers like Sembene
Ousmane and Ferdinand Oyono, which explored immigrant motifs by deploy-
ing the classic plot of a centripetal flight from Africa (site of diminished oppor-
tunities/failure) to the Occidental Eldorado, the diasporic durie text is not
ensconced within the politics of flight. France, here, is not a site of arrival. It is an
already consolidated site of "being in the Diaspora," as Dionne Brand puts it in
her fine memoir A Map to theDoor of no Return (26). In the same vein, for the
hero/ine of the diasporic dureetext, as we see in Place desfites, Africa is also not a
physical site of departure. It is an imaginary space whose contours can only be
glimpsed from the daily nostalgic gestures of parents who originally departed.
The dilemma of the narrator-hero in Place desfites is occasioned by the onto-
logical split between the migrant and the diasporic conditions: the migrant is
still able to conceive of a past anchored in a physical space of origin while the
diasporic subject lacks such vital latitudes. According to Brand,
There is a sense of return in migrations-a sense of continuities, remembered homes-as with birds
or butterflies or deer or fish. Those returns which are lodged indelibly, unconsciously, instinctively
in the mind. But migrations suggests intentions or purposes. Some choice and, if not choice, deci-
sions. And if not decisions, options, all be they difficult. But the sense of return in the Door of No
Return is one of irrecoverable losses of those very things which make returning possible. A place to
return to, a way of being, familiar sights or sounds, familiar smells, a welcome perhaps, but a place,
welcome or not. (24)

Choice, decisions, options: all are possibilities denied the narrator-hero of Place
des fites by virtue of his situation as a diasporic progenitor of immigrant African
parents. Unlike his parents, he lacks a place to return to, an African way of being,
yet the familiar sights, smells, and sounds of Paris, the city of his birth, inscribe
him as an outsider, an Other, a problem.
This psychic/identitarian impasse accounts for the hero's temperament and
impacts on the plot and narrativestructures of the text. The chapters are sequenced

18This new order, now loosely referred to as globalization, has not only facilitated an unprec-
edented movement of people from the Global South to the metropolitan sites of the West, but has
also generated an increased awareness of the presence of the Other and the politics of Otherness.
As traditional boundaries crumble under the dual advance of migrancy and the immediacy of the
information age, theory is forced to undertake a radical re-examination of its categories. The bor-
der as a physical locus of division is refigured as a site of contact and continuity capable of gener-
ating novel forms of identity. It becomes an independent territory, a "borderland,"as Gloria Anzaldua
puts it. Mary Louise Pratt encourages us to reflect on the possibilities of "contact zones," while Arjun
Appadurai suggests five "scapes"that regulate flows in an essentially borderless, transnational space.
9 A list of other notable examples might include Leandre-Alain Baker's Ici s'achevele voyage,Calixthe
Beyala's Le petit prince de Belleville,Jean-Roger Essomba's Le paradis du nord,Aboubacar Diop's Dans
la peau d'un sans-papiers,Daniel Biyaoula's L'impasse,Alain Mabanckou's Bleu-Blanc-Rouge,and Fatou
Diome's La Priferencenationale.

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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
/ 238

like cinema clips, and every chapter bears the title, "putain de .. ." (fucking ...).
Every character he describes-including his parents, sisters, and all African im-
migrants-every situation he evinces, is introduced using this vulgar interjec-
tion. The cinematic mode throws us into his life in the streets of Paris where we
witness the familiar life situations of immigrant and diasporic populations in a
Western city. The hero's language never departs from the curse-laden, vulgar
street slang of Paris. He has no compunction about furnishing lurid details con-
cerning his two sisters who are now prostitutes in Holland, his sexual romps with
his voluptuous cousin, his gang raping of the cousin of his Malian friend, his
incestuous relationship with one of his own sisters, and, finally, his latent desire
to sleep with his own mother, whom he calls a "whore."
One way in which Place desfites departs significantly from other texts of the
diasporic dureeis the hero's unsympathetic, even hostile, handling of the roots
motif. He has no patience with his father's obsession to return to die in Africa.
He condemns the hypocrisy of African immigrants who cling to romanticized
reminiscences of home while downplaying the conditions that occasioned their
flight in the first place. He has no sympathy for their ritualistic recourse to the
race card whenever they confront official French policies deemed hostile to im-
migrants, and he defends the right of France to adopt measures against invasion
by immigrants. Yet on other occasions France becomes the target of his acerbic,
vulgar recriminations. In the end, no one escapes the hero's verbal darts, not
even himself. He thus succeeds in sustaining an aura of physical and psychological
discomfort throughout the text, a condition which Placedesiftes,like all diasporic
dureetexts, metaphorizes as the inescapable foundation of diasporic subjecthood.

Conclusion

What the diasporic duree texts underscore in their ideological linkages with
the novels of the power and feminist dureesis the continued presence of the
script of colonialism as the backdrop of African textual production years after
the official demise of that historical event. Colonialism and its heir in the present,
neocolonialism, authored the conditions from which the despotic political cli-
mate depicted in the power dureenovels emerged. The combined effects of sub-
sisting modalities of colonialist oppression and the postcolonial vitiation of the
African present-which we encounter in testimonial narratives like Pius Ngandu
Nkashama's Citadelled'espoir, Wole Soyinka's TheOpenSoreofa Continent,and Ngugi
wa Thiong'o's Writersin Politics-are responsible for the construction of the Occi-
dent as the only solution to a hostile African present. Hence the mass migrations
from which the diasporic durie has emerged. These diasporic texts consistently
hark back to colonialism and neocolonialism. Thus, for example, in PlacedesJites
the hero's father's services to France during the colonial period are consistently
referenced to underscore that European country's ingratitude in its present-day
dealings with the loyal ex-colonial subject.
The feminist durie novels, while ostensibly challenging African men and patri-
archy, are also heavily invested in the subtext of colonialism. While not denying
the existence of forms of sexist oppression in pre-European Africa, much recent

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 OF POSTCOLONIAL ENTANGLEMENT & DUREE/239

African feminist scholarship examines how the colonial machine worsened the
condition of African women by eroding traditional mechanisms of female agency
and imposing Western sexist models. The work of Oyeronke Oyewumi and Obioma
Nnaemeka are crucial in this regard. Such analyses ultimately establish linkages
between the phallocentric and sexist nature of the "modernist" institutions of
the contemporary African nation-state and the sexist colonial structures that pro-
duced them. Consequently, the critique of the sexist and dysfunctional struc-
tures of the state is pervasive in the feminist durie novels.
That the three duries have governed Francophone African literary production
equally in the last three decades underscores the importance of the connections
between African history and literature. Studying them as three distinctive but
interconnected particularities within a broad historical continuum allows for an
engagement with Africa's postcolonial phase in terms of its linkages to the forces
that continue to shape the African present. And within these intertwined tempo-
ral conjunctures is the subaltern African subject who must not only negotiate the
normative authority of a problematic past without becoming its prisoner, but
also seek to overcome the daunting conditions of a present in which the global-
ized dynamics of the market combine with local conditions of power and trun-
cated democracies to vitiate agency.20

ThePennsylvaniaStateUniversity

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