From L'etat sauvage to L'etat honteux

I no longer remember exactly how the connection between the two novels came to my mind: Georges Conchon's L'état sauvage (The savage state), winner of the Goncourt prize in 1964, and Sony Labou Tansi's L'état honteux (The shameful state), published seventeen years later, in 1981. Was it the parallelism between the two titles and the two "states": that of "savagery" and that of "shame"? What is certain is that the associative links could occur only from the moment when I discovered the Congolese author's novel, which I perceived, vaguely, as a "response" to that of his French peer. Not in the sense of any influence one on the other, nor even of an imitation, continuation, or other technique in the style of plagiarism or aping.

The two titles seemed, in a way, to summarize two different literary traditions, two discourses, two ways of speaking about the other, of situating oneself with respect to the other, but which met and melded inextricably at a given moment of their course (or of their trajectory). A European discourse on "savages" (or "barbarians," "pagans," "naturals," "indigenous peoples") created objects of its will of knowledge and domination, with missionary zeal, religious or civilizing (or both at once), transforming them into subjects of a foreign and alienating power. On the other hand, a discourse of "shame" accompanies, from the beginning, the discursive influence of the age of discovery and the violence of colonial subjection, from Brevísima relación by the Dominican Father Las Casas, Montaigne's Essais, and the anticolonialism of Rousseau, Diderot, and Raynal to the positions taken by writers during the period of decolonization in favor of the (un)subdued peoples: Gide, Sartre, Leiris, or from the German side, Enzensberger, and Peter Weiss.

With the appearance of African writers using European languages in the first decades of the twentieth century, advocates of these European discourses had the experience of seeing their tenets put into question, contradicted, deconstructed. Let us remember, if only by example, the deconstruction of the notion of civilization in the preface of Batouala (1921), the first "true Negro novel." ³ As Black African literature in the French language continued developing--through many "ruptures" (see Ngal)--things became complicated: a colonial literature, monolithic in appearance, defending the monopoly of its discourse on Africa, cracks apart a little more each day and sees itself forced to make a retreat, to lose terrain; on the other hand, some African writers occupy not only this terrain but also appropriate discourses of the past and transform them into "miraculous weapons," as with the former master's language. They oppose in the civilizing discourse not only with the defense of the antiquity and great value of African civilizations but also by coming to terms with "savagery" itself: the beast Caliban against Prospero. They oppose the contemptuous continental discourse of the West not only with claims about the role of African civilizations (see Cheikh Anta Diop) but they also contemplate the causes of their own "shame"-- the "cinq siècles à tout casser [que] l'Histoire nous a volé[s]" 'almost five centuries [that] were stolen from us by History' (qtd. in Devésa 359). The response to the contemptuous discourse on the "savages" is both a pride of being (and of having been) "savages" and the "shame" of having been "savages," and of not having been sufficiently "savage," with the consequence being that in L'état honteux, the "civilized" and the "savage," the past and present, us and them are all equally implicated.

Before pursuing our parallel between L'état sauvage and L'état honteux in a more systematic fashion, let us recall the dangers against which Georges Ngal has warned us in the chapter "Comparatisme et approche du phénomène littéraire africain" in his Création et rupture en littérature africaine, his target being Alain...