From Francophonie to World Literature in French: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics

1. Writing as Mimicry

1 Writing as Mimicry Tierno Monénembo’s Colonial Avatar Living in exile since 1969, Guinean-born writer Tierno Monénembo defines himself as “a runaway writer,” a writer first and foremost whose primary task is to explore and interrogate “the extraordinary complexity of life” (Cévaër 1993, 111, 166). In a 1987 interview Monénembo says that the Guinean youth who grew up in a country controlled by President Ahmed Sékou Touré’s repressive ideology suffered from too much Manichaeism and needed “ambiguity” and “doubt”; as Monénembo also puts it, “There is nothing better than seeing oneself through the other’s gaze, even when this gaze is subjective, hateful” (quoted in Jacquey 1987, 152).¹ Thus in his work Monénembo combines aesthetic commitment and political engagement by pointing, as Ambroise Teko-Agbo states, to “a deep conviction: impertinence and the freedom to write remain, for him and for every creator, precious tools against the arrogance and condescendence of all powers” (1996, 98).² Teko-Agbo further highlights the subversive dimension of Monénembo’s work by noting the following about his novel Un attiéké pour Elgass (1993): “One also notices in it offensiveness against moral rules, insolence toward authority, subversion of the official ideological 2 writing as mimicry discourse, impudence” (1996, 96). Likewise, in one of Monénembo’s most recent and best-known novels, The Oldest Orphan (published in French in 2000), the story of the Rwandan genocide is told from the fragmented, seemingly dispassionate, and at times even ironic viewpoint of a teenager. The King of Kahel further exemplifies Monénembo’s subversive rewriting of dominant discourses by offering a critical counter-narrative of the colonial time that does not lead him to downplay its destructive brutality but, rather, to point out the multifarious voices underwriting this period. Monénembo retraces the life of the French explorer Olivier de Sanderval, who, at the beginning of the 1880s, set off to conquer the Fula region of Fouta Djallon (in modern Guinea) in order to become the “king of Kahel” and to build a railroad.³ In the process of acquiring the beautiful Kahel plateau, Sanderval becomes close to the local chiefs and princes and is declared to be a Fula himself by the almami, the supreme monarch of the land. However, the political leaders of the French Third Republic refuse to recognize Sanderval’s possessions and, despite his relentless opposition to the forceful imposition of military rule, incorporate Fouta Djallon into the French colony of Guinea. This novel, the fictionalized biography of a French adventurer written from the perspective of a Fula writer, undermines rigid dichotomies between the colonizers and the colonized by focusing on the dissident figure of a Frenchman who, despite his inherited racial prejudices and selfinterested motivations, becomes so assimilated into Fula culture that French colonial administrators suspect him of being a traitor. Rather than looking at French and Fula cultures as two exclusive entities in the rapidly changing global context of the late nineteenth century, Monénembo chooses instead to describe the varied interactions, driven by greed and envy, as well as by alliances and mutual curiosity, between an ambitious Frenchman and power-hungry Fula rulers. In the process Monénembo examines the complex political, ideological , and cultural forces at play during a time that sees individual explorers and adventurers, eager to discover faraway lands and peo- writing as mimicry 3 ples, being progressively sidestepped by a European scramble for Africa that culminates at the 1884 Berlin Conference. While stigmatizing Sanderval’s exotic perception of Africa and his ingrained belief in the superiority of French culture and its civilizing mission, Monénembo’s novel constitutes a tacit warning against the pitfalls of discourses that posit a homogeneous Western colonial ideology by opposition to a highly critical and subversive postcolonial thought. Although Sanderval’s keen interest in Fula culture remains atypical during his time, his increasingly fractured identity, his painstaking negotiations between “the perils of the bush” and “the jungle of the Paris bureaucracy,” “the crocodiles of Africa” and “the caimans of the ministries” (Monénembo 2010, 125, 127) illustrate the various views on race and otherness that underlie the late nineteenth century. Like other contemporary French-speaking writers who reject the French/ Francophone dichotomy, Monénembo undermines binary oppositions by giving voice to the Fulas themselves and by highlighting their own perceptions of white...