Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa

2. African Conscripts/European Conflicts: Race, Memory, and the Lessons of War

You Senegalese Soldiers, my black brothers with warm hands under ice and death Who can praise you if not your brother-in-arms, your brother in blood? I shall not let the words of government ministers nor generals, No! I shall not let the words of scornful praise secretly bury you. You are not empty-pocket poor men without honor But I will tear off the banania grins from all the walls of France —Senghor, “Liminary Poem” In Henri Camus’ 1917 black and white watercolor, Tirailleur dans les barbelés [Tirailleur (infantryman) on barbed wire], we see the isolated, distorted body of an African soldier hung up on a few strands of barbed wire and leaning posts (figure 1). Shot dead, his body arcs back, face toward the sky, one knee forever straddling the top wire. Behind him is the empty gray of no-man’sland , before him just the viewer. He is arrested forever in this hideous borderland .There is something uncanny about this African soldier suspended on the frontier between two cultures that are not his own, something that demands to be explained.Tracing Heidegger’s idea that “a boundary is not that at which 45 CHAPTER TWO African Conscripts/European Conflicts Race, Memory, and the Lessons of War something stops but . . . that from which something begins its presencing,” Homi Bhabha notes that while “beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years . . . in the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and Of Irony and Empire 46 FIGURE 1. Henri Camus, Tirailleur dans les barbelés, watercolor, 1917 (Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine—Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale contemporaine: MHC-BDIC), Images et Colonies (1880–1962), BDIC-ACHAC (Association Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine), 1993, 95. exclusion” (Location of Culture 1). This African soldier, who would have been born at the end of the nineteenth century, and brought to die in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, begins his presencing as the figure of transit : Where did he come from? Who brought him to Europe? Why did he come? Whom did he leave behind? What did he experience? How was he treated? What is the connection between this dead tirailleur, used as cannon fodder, and those commodified tirailleurs with banania grins, referred to by Senghor in the epigraph, used to advertise the French breakfast cereal Banania . What begins its presencing in the hideous borderland inhabited by the dead tirailleur is a demand that the distance between the discourse about the tirailleur and the reality of his dislocation and death be examined. And the beyond in this presencing is in the voice of this tirailleur himself. The modern cataclysms embodied in World War I and World War II are remembered as examples of intra-European hatred that seemed, at the time, irreversible and irremediable. And yet these enemies have managed, time and again, to forgive and forget and unite with each other in order to turn on the perennial enemy: the cultural, racial other—the body on the barbed wire suspended in no-man’s-land. This chapter deals with Western racial paradigms prevalent in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, as they relate to the experience and representation of African soldiers forced to fight other people’s battles in World Wars I and II. Brought in from places like Senegal, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, these soldiers were conscripted into wars that were not their own, fighting for nations that extended to them the duty of defense, but denied them the rights of citizenship . These “colored” soldiers provided popular images for propaganda, and yet, like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, remained themselves largely unseen and unheard. Western writing about African involvement in these intraEuropean conflicts, as well as the personal narratives of Africans about conscription , combat, and demobilization, provide rich ground for the exploration of the odd hybridity of the situation of the colonized.These texts illustrate, on the one hand, how “the universalist narrative of nineteenth-century historical and political evolutionism” unraveled (Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders” 172). On the other hand, they demonstrate the longevity of racial theories claimed to have disappeared with colonialism. This chapter explores the hybrid identity forced upon the colonial soldiers by...