Les nouvelles voies de la litterature et de la liberation (une litterature voyoue) (review)

In this provocative and lively book, Michel Naumann draws our attention to a recent trend in African literature that has emerged since the 1980s and '90s, which he calls "une littérature 'voyoue.'" Although Naumann does not offer a precise definition of this kind of literature—"voyoue" can be roughly translated as "vagrant, ill-mannered and of the street," the reader surmises that this evocative phrase refers to a group of texts that depict misery, dispossession, violence, and crisis in contrast to the dignified revolt of what he calls "orphic literature," otherwise known as literature of engagement. The main thesis of Naumann's book is simple: colonial liberation did not bring prosperity to the people as promised and this bitter sense of betrayal is being represented in vivid terms by African writers as spiritual and material dispossession. Famine, epidemics, and civil war of recent years have opened the way, Naumann proposes, to obscene occult practices and a genre of desperation in the African novel (20). The gritty, cynical joie de vivre that characterizes Naumann's writing stands in sharp contrast to the rational tranquility of the armchair theorists who devise categories that reflect the projected fantasies of the European middle class rather than objective analysis. Naumann offers insightful readings of works by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Sony Labou Tansi, Tchicaya U'Tamsi, Nuruddin Farah, and Amos Tutuola and demonstrates such an impressive range of reference including many unknown writers that his disregard for the formalities of "rigorous scholarship"—there are only eleven footnotes in all and they reference classics such as Basil Davidson and Frantz Fanon—is forgiven in the end. What he offers us is a personal essay written with verve and passion summing up what has happened in African literature since the heyday of the liberation movements of the 1960s.

It would appear that Naumann himself finds the notion of a "littérature voyoue" difficult to define, whether in terms of formal attributes, literary sensibility, or temporal succession. Such writers as Ahmadou Kourouma and Tierno Monénembo, for example, wind up affirming the continuity between orphic literature and the more vulgar, popular fiction of recent years rather than suggesting a clean break. The defining features of this "new trend" that Naumann posits are thus at times contradictory: explosive liberation through cathartic laughter set against persistent themes of emasculation in the aftermath of colonial domination, a healthy respect for ritual and the spiritual domain alongside a cultural narrative of dispossession that is sometimes material but always spiritual, and so on. Ultimately, Naumann affirms a belief that he shares with many of the authors he writes about, that is, a belief in the therapeutic value of art and the necessity of respecting human diversity.