To Paris and Back: Seeking a Balance

In an article entitled “Premiers contacts avec Paris,” which recalls his first impression of the noise and bustle of Paris in 1947, Camara Laye elucidates the transformation that took place within him as a result of contact with that city:

[O]n se familiarise [. . .] on en prend si bien l’habitude qu’on finit par n’y plus prêter attention.[ . . . C]’est qu’on a changé et qu’on est tout changé: et cette transformation qui s’opère presque à notre insu, me semble mériter réflexion.

[Y]ou get used to it . [. . . Y]ou grow so well accustomed that you end up not paying attention any more. [. . .I]t’s because you have changed and you are completely changed: and this transformation which takes place almost without your knowledge, seems to me to deserve careful thought. (21–22; my translation) ¹

Although the author’s evocation of the city’s dynamic energy is, as we shall see, eulogistic in tone, it is natural, given the shock of first contact, that the question of coping in such a vastly different environment should also arise. The suggested adaptation to a new culture appears normal enough but it has its price in the kinds of changes in perspective it demands. Such adjustments, irreversible in nature, will be the focus of our attention: changes that will engender not only a feeling of distance from his own culture, after what is to be a seven-year absence, but also criticism of many of the forces and values of European society that are inherently alien and abhorrent to the native-born African. By challenging the primacy of the European value system, which poses as a model for all cultures, Camara Laye addresses the dilemma of the postcolonial subject whose lack of a safe cultural reference point causes that person to float between two or more worlds. Analysis of this model and of the author’s response will lead to a dialectic on the question of cultural synthesis, and will include reference to current thinking on marginality and to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called “nomad thought.”

When Camara Laye left Guinea in 1947, he was only seventeen. Brief references in his autobiographical work, L’enfant noir, clearly reveal his inexperience and ignorance of life in France (220–21). When presented with a metro map as he sets out, he is totally baffled not only by the information on the map, but also by the whole concept of underground travel. Furthermore, he journeys in light clothing suitable to his homeland but woefully inadequate for the exigencies of the European winter. The article, in which he discloses the impact on him of his arrival, portrays a similar naïveté, and typifies the feelings of a young and impressionable African boy at the prospect of adventure in the big city.

Written not only as a homage to Paris itself, but also as an encouragement to those who are to follow in his footsteps, “Premiers contacts avec Paris” comments predictably on the city’s “perspective majestueuse” ‘majestic perspective,’ its glorious past and history of academic excellence. But it also, by use of such words as “aggressivement—bruyante” ‘aggressively—noisy’ and “mouvementé” ‘bustling,’ evokes a Paris which is a giddy maze, and which leaves the author “assourdi et étourdi” ‘deafened and stunned’ (21). The crowd—“la cohue,” “la foule impatiente” ‘the crush,’ ‘the impatient crowd’ (21)—is represented as a restless organism surging this way and that—an image leading the author to metaphysical reflections on the varying cultures that are its component parts, and that ultimately meld in this “très étrange creuset” ‘very strange melting pot,’ thereby endowing the city with its cosmopolitan air (22). While the different cultures apparently retain the customs and norms that give each one its individual cachet, they somehow manage to conform to a certain mode of living in Paris, or as the author expresses it, they don the metaphorical “uniform” of the city. This integration, combined with a retention of difference, suggests a form of mimicry the effect of which, records Lacan, “is...