Sounding Off: Rhythm, Music, and Identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone Novels

Concluding Remarks

Concluding Remarks Rhythmsandrhythmicprocessesunderlieeverythingwedo.Physiological, biological, and planetary rhythms regulate the functions of our bodies, other living organisms, and our surrounding environments, while linguistic and cultural rhythms shape our interactions with others as we move through space and time. And then there are the rhythms of music, the rhythms of working, the rhythms of our lives, and the rhythms of the stories of our lives. There are noisy random rhythms, comfortable and uncomfortable rhythms, the familiar rhythms of tradition playing alongside inventive rhythms that no one has ever heard before. It is through rhythm—through our quotidian interactions with distinct but overlapping rhythms and rhythmic systems—that we come to understand who we are and how we relate to others and the world. Perpetually shifting from one moment and context to the next, through the rhythms, musics, and random noises we experience and encounter, we come to (re)configure identities for ourselves and (re)negotiate social positionalities in relation to others and the world. While rhythmic phenomena operate in every area of our lives and experiences ,theaimofthisstudywastofocusonhowrhythm,music,andsound operate in texted forms/forums, specifically in novels, and to explore how texted sounding phenomena create spaces for identity appropriation that operate both inside and outside the frame of literary texts, and specifically in novels. In discussing Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence, Aminata Sow Fall’s L’appel des arènes, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean L’horizon, Maryse Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove, and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent, this study has 218 / sounding off uncovered layers of multiple sonorities as manifest in texted representations of rhythmic and musical phenomena. Vibrantly presented in narrative descriptions of the sounds of singing, dancing, and music making, as well as evocations of the rhythms of biology, technology, and miscellaneous everyday noises, such texted rhythmic and musical components create resonant imaginative soundscapes that promote a transpoetic aesthetic from within the frame of the novel in which written, oral, and instrumental styles intermingle. As a means of addressing the specificity of texted representations of nonvocal rhythmic and musical components as transposed in the frame of the novel, this study presented the new term “instrumentaliture,” and defined it as phenomena through which the sonorities of instrumental music and the sounds of everyday instruments and objects—including performance pieces, sound compositions, and musical arrangements and improvisations—are presented in the frame of written literature, creating sounding spaces for innovation, communication , negotiation, and exchange. Evoking the emotions and expressiveness of ordinary and extraordinary resonant phenomena in texted forms, instrumentaliture inspires readers to (re)consider and (re)configure their understandings of aesthetic, linguistic, political, and sociocultural criteria, among others, in a resounding relational forum. Although similar to oraliture , a process through which oral genres are transcribed and described in written literature, instrumentaliture is nonetheless distinct from oraliture in that it infuses textual spaces with resonant elements that are neither oral nor written. As demonstrated in this study, this move away from the binary modes of categorization that are used to bifurcate categories including but not limited to oral versus written, traditional versus modern, and Occidental versus Oriental has important implications, particularly when approaching questions of identity in the postcolonial Francophone world. By breaking free of binary tendencies, writers succeed in opening questions of identity to realms of boundless possibility in which the array of identificatory configurations is infinite rather than limited. In view of questions of identity, this study has also analyzed the importance of the concept of “transculture,” a term used in describing phenomena that are shared, communicated, appropriated, and exchanged among and across multiple cultures and/or cultural systems. In discussing the novels selected for this study, it has been useful to present the word “transculture ” in tandem with “transpoetics” in characterizing the transpoetic transcultural space of the text. A noisy texted space in which the silences and sonorities of multiple aesthetic categories intermingle and/or coalesce, and the products and perspectives of diverse cultural systems overlap and/ or interconnect, the transpoetic transcultural space is filled with resonant potential in both function and in form. Through the course of the analysis, concluding remarks / 219 this study has established the transpoetic transcultural space as a forum for communication, invention, negotiation, and exchange, in which autonomous identity constructs are (re)considered, (re)configured, and/or (re)appropriated. In discussing Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood...