Normes linguistiques et ecriture africaine chez Ousmane Sembene (review)

Normes linguistiques et écriture africaine chez Ousmane Sembène, by Anthère Nzabatsinda. Toronto: GREF, 1996. Xxii + 211 pp. ISBN 0-921916-79-5.

Armed with a battery of linguistic and theoretical concepts--norme, langue, diglossie, dé-territorialisation, paratexte, littérature nationale--Anthère Nzabatsinda aims to show "how the African writer accepts the constraints of the French language and exploits its resources so as to shape it into an 'African' tool that participates in the creation of truly African works seeking a worldwide audience" (xxi). In particular he examines the novels of Ousmane Sembène to determine whether Sembène can be considered representative of this literary production. The group to which Sembène's novels are compared includes "transitional" novels (in which the problematics of language, like the plot, are related to the theme of identity): Malick Fall's La plaie, Yambo Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence, and Ahmadou Kourouma's Les soleils des indépendances; and "modern" novels (in which the act of speech is itself problematized, regardless of the language spoken): V.Y. Mudimbe's Le bel immonde, Tchicaya U'Tamsi's Les Méduses ou les orties de mer, and Sony Labou Tansi's Les yeux du volcan. For Nzabatsinda, all these writers share one and the same problem: they seek to resolve the conflict due to using an essentially foreign language, governed by exogenous norms. This conflict transcends their national identities and thus allows us to speak in institutional terms of "l'écrivain 'africain'"(96).

In Sembène's early works in particular, Nzabatsinda finds an oppositional structure in which characters are grouped and are in conflict based on their use of French or of African languages, while in modern novels, characters are conceived on an individual basis. In Sembène, characters devise solutions to problems, whereas in contemporary novels, they suffer madness, silence, confusion, failure, and death. Sembène envisages a supranational Africa, while in contemporary novels authenticity is defined by individuals or, at best, in terms of their ethnic group. Dialogue dominates in Sembène's fictions, while narration, marked by polyphony and multilingualism, dominates in contemporary novels. Sembène takes care to identify the varied African languages being spoken and to gloss terms that non-Senegalese readers may not understand through apposition or notes, unlike the contemporary novelists who, Nzabatsinda argues, target a "universal" public. The possibility of multiple interpretations in contemporary novels (in contrast to the limiting of such interpretations in Sembène's novels) is for Nzabatsinda a further sign of modernity, as is the contemporary writers' greater sense of freedom vis-à-vis French lexical and syntactical norms and the broad general culture that they require of their ideal readers. Whereas Sembène inaugurates the use of prefaces and is therefore a precursor of the modern author who also practices such "discours d'auteur," Nzabatsinda finds nonetheless that Sembène is traditional in his insistence on the relationship of his art, like that of the griot, to the real world, "l'aspect impur de sa fiction" (164).

Apart from its many individual and provocative insights with respect to this or that text, what I like best about Normes linguistiques et écriture africaine chez Ousmane Sembène is that it comes close to developing a true periodization of French-language African novels on the basis of formal (linguistic) practices. In this respect, I find it to be original and extremely helpful. Questions nag, nonetheless. I remain skeptical about French norms and normalcy, the superiority of a definition of "the African writer" based on a conflict with French language, the fact that no woman novelist figures in the corpus of moderns nor is any woman novelist ever mentioned by name. Had Nzabatsinda taken account of women novelists, might his modern corpuses have looked different? And is it significant that all of his modern novels come from Equatorial Africa and all the transitional novels from West Africa...