Yambo Ouologuem, Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant (review)

Yambo Ouologuem, Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, ed. Christopher Wise. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999. 258 pp. 0-89410-861-1. US$55.

During the 1970s, when African literature was sinking roots in European and North American academic institutions, Yambo Ouologuem was a pivotal figure. Le devoir de violence had burst onto the scene, announcing a radical shift in literary sensibility, an alternative to the rather flat realist or the "sincere" autobiographical modes of self-expression then prevalent. Sincere, by all evidence, is something Ouologuem was not. The text and its author were quickly embroiled in rounds of polemic concerning its possible plagiarism.

The novel ultimately kept its annunciatory promise. We need only think of the subsequent works of Sony Labou Tansi, V. Y. Mudimbe, or indeed Calixthe Beyala, to realize how far African writing in French has leapt from the early years--if, that is, literary leaps and bounds can be measured in terms of innovation and experiment. Though Ouologuem was not the sine qua non of this development, his text cleared terrain for others to cultivate, or in Wise's words, he helped swab the deck.

Then, of course, a strange thing happened. After another provocative but less successful work, Lettre à la France nègre, and a decent piece of pornography, for readers with those tastes, Ouologuem dropped from the (European) face of the earth. It turned out he had simply returned to Africa, translating into actual fact the metaphor of retour aux sources that dominates the literary but not necessarily geographical logic of African intellectuals. From the French perspective, there was something very Rimbaud-like in this renunciation and almost angelic departure. As Christopher Wise's personal chapters in the book under review amply demonstrate, such a reading of Ouologuem's trajectory is profoundly Eurocentric, though once again, there is room for considerable ambiguity when it comes to almost anything dealing with this fascinating figure.

Wise's book contains the key elements of that critical history, sometimes in their original form, sometimes re-edited. [On this point, see the exchange of letters between Miller and Wise in RAL 31.1 (2000): 229-31.--G.L.] Those that did not fit in (among them, Eileen Julien's "Rape, Repression and Narrative Form" and my "Text, Identity and Difference") are signposted; the gamut of response is fully covered, from positive to negative, as well as the interstitial spaces between. More to the point, Thomas Hale's and Wise's own insertion of the "Islamic-Sahelian" dimension into the debate are brought into accessible form. In other words, the first three parts of the book constitute an essential source for study of the reception of Ouologuem and fully justify its acquisition by any serious library. It is, however, the concluding accounts of Wise's own research in the field which make this volume indispensable for future discussion of Ouologuem and open the path for innovative in vivo research into African writing.

I recall when I first heard rumor, over coffee with Tom Hale at some nondescript conference, of Wise's discovery that Ouologuem had not left us for a better world, but was alive and, if not necessarily well, at least kicking near Mopti at the edge of the Dogon country in the bend of the Niger River (a map, incidentally, would have been useful). Like many readers, I had pretty much let the matter of Ouologuem drop, with occasional regret, since every time I returned with my students to the pages of Le devoir de violence, I recognized we were in the hands of a master stylist of French, his borrowing, stealing, lifting and re-voicing notwithstanding. What if, in fact, there was life after scriptural death? The question was even more intriguing because the alternative version of Ouologuem's putative death was the equally engaging allegation of insanity, or at least folly, itself a standard trope of posthumous literary prestige.

As Wise is the first to admit, serendipity alone allowed him...