Black Accents: Writing in French from Africa, Mauritius and the Caribbean (review)

Black Accents: Writing in French from Africa, Mauritius and the Caribbean, ed. J. P. Little and Roger Little. London: Grant and Cutler, 1997. x + 286 pp. ISBN 0-7293-0390-X paper.

This is a rare find: a volume of collected conference proceedings that provides solid interpretations while surveying a whole array of genres (testimonials, cultural history, theater, fiction, cinema, travel writing, nationalist discourse, poetry, translation, and music) from a wide variety of geographical and cultural contexts. The editors rightly state that "[f]rancophone literature has been one of the most exciting extensions of French writing in recent years" but that "there is still a great deal of groundwork to be done" if literary critics want to approach this corpus seriously and "with no loss of scholarly rigour" (vii).

The volume strikes a pleasant interdisciplinary balance. It opens with a previously unpublished poem by René Depestre and concludes with a lighthearted interview with Francis Bebey whose humor and talent shine through, despite the tantalizing lack of an audio example of his musical performance at the close of the conference. It is upon reading such an interview that I become convinced that were books to be soon displaced by CD-ROMs, we might well gain something, given the centrality of performance in francophone and other contexts. Indeed, the essays on Caribbean and African theater and ritual (Jones, Conteh-Morgan, Upton) highlight the richness of the genre and the fact that it remains, much more than the traditional novel ever was, in touch with its local public.

This said, let me hasten to add that the power and usefulness of the written word is well documented in several of these contributions. From Chambers's focus on the dialectic of the particular and the universal in Césaire's poetry to Dérive's analysis of traditional oral poetry and the usefulness of translation, from Le Rumeur's study of Maryse Condé's quest to Murphy's fine analysis of Sembène's Voltaïque and Marion Thomas's learned account of Bernard Dadié's intertextual references, this collection proves the vitality of textuality. The complexity of Loys Masson's and Tanella Boni's work is highlighted by the Freudian approaches of Mongelard and Hitchcott, respectively. Afoullouss's comparative discussion of Chraïbi's and Kane's classic autobiographical narratives is subtle and illuminating. János Riesz's formal study of the "folie" of the tirailleurs sénégalais is an important piece of cultural history as is Levillain's focus on the ethnographic value of a béké testimonial that documents the "transformation d'une société raciale en société raciste" 'transformation of a racial society into a racist society' (15). Ridehalgh contextualizes her analysis of Sembène's subversive film Guelwaar by providing important historical and philosophical background. Feeney and Corcoran discuss issues of métissage, whereas Dominic Thomas gives a balanced account of the meaning of nationalism.

While it is comforting to see that the seldom studied Indian Ocean area is included here, it is regrettable that Feeney uses a rather superficial and survey-like approach to one of the major Mauritian novels of the last twenty years--Marie-Thérèse Humbert's A l'autre bout de moi, a work that has been the object of rigorous scrutiny by several other scholars. Such a mistake undermines the stated purpose of the editors to provide serious, in-depth analysis of francophone literatures and cultures.

Françoise Lionnet

Françoise Lionnet is Professor of French at the University of California-Los Angeles.

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