From Africa: New Francophone Stories (review)

This slim and attractive product gathers together 14 short stories from sub-Saharan French-speaking Africa, almost all of them translated specifically for the purposes of this anthology (and at least two of the pieces written especially for it). As the editor, Adele King, outlines in her introduction, the intention of her collection is to make available conveniently a fair sample of recent work—say, of the past decade, which is about the usual timelag in such publishing—from those "margins" that are nowadays so enriching the core French literature of the motherlands.

Her sources are of interest: up to her starting point Radio France Internationale with its popular short story contests, and Présence Africaine of old, both superseded largely by the publisher Le Serpent à Plumes (from whom Abdourahman Waberi and Jean-Luc Raharimanana derive) and even journals like La Nouvelle Revue Française (the origin of items by Véronique Tadjo and Tierno Monénembo).

It rather goes without saying, however, that Paris (or Brussels) is the place of first publication of each and every item (rather than any Africa-based outlet). All of her highly skilled and excellent translators also happen to be assistant/associate professors in French on campuses in the US (rather than any scholars still inclined to be resident on the continent of Africa itself). An effort like the Zimbabwe Translation Project, which in 2001 first saw an early Waberi story into print (in Fools, Thieves and Other Dreamers: Stories from Francophone Africa), goes unnoticed in the bibliographical essay.

Relatedly the works themselves tend to be about a continent almost entirely abandoned by its emergent writers who, while sentimentally living off their indigenous pasts, do so from the safety of one or another European fastness—in most cases, according to the notes on contributors, Paris itself, where almost all of them have lived "for a large part of their adult lives." So the collection is a glaring symptom of a postcolonial phenomenon: expats behaving like Africans, writing perforce for an audience anywhere but at home. So entrenched have such procedures become that a purist old patriot might be forced to raise the query if any of this activity is really African at all. But such is the condition of literary production in French from Togo, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Congo, Rwanda, Djibouti, and Madagascar (and in excluding Maghrebian literature, King has unfortunately lost out on a major force such as Tahar Ben Jelloun).

Yet it is a valiant move of King's to have assembled her cluster of talents in the pithy, vulnerable short fiction form—and behold, the splintered, rootless diasporic experience is indeed depicted especially fittingly in these brief prose pieces, even if from only too close at hand, as in Nathalie Etoké's "Bessombè" (about that typical "without papers," sweeping the Paris subways on his "big adventure"). Be it Michèle Rakotoson using the traditional interior monologue ingeniously (in "The Ballad of a Shipwreck"); Tadjo with her creation myth rejigged (in "The Legend of Abla Pokou"); Kangni Alem with buffo satire (as in "The Spider's Fart," delectably about that "enlightened leader who can't even give his people electricity twenty-four hours a day but still always wins elections with 99 percent of the vote"); or Bessora with the Latin American-type magico-fantasy, which one would have thought past its sell-by date, but is saved in "The Milka Cow" by its wildly Surrealist humor . . . variety and cunningness hold sway.

Clearly such practitioners are exploiting the possibilities in their tricky inheritance of the Western short story form with relish, not to mention giving it some splendidly subtle fresh twists. Kossi Efoui's "A Hunting Scene as Observed by a Sentimental Photographer" (about a terrifying necklacing) is a late masterpiece in the genre, as is Benjamin Sehene's "Dead Girl Walking," which is about an amnesiac girl giving testimony of the Rwandan genocide, complete with a viciously appropriate snapper ending.

Presumably King has had to...