Lettres maliennes: figures et configurations de l’activité littéraire au Mali (review)

Classical anthologies have only retained the “cult” literary figures of Mali—Hampaté Bâ, Seydou Badian, Yambo Ouologuem, Ibrahima Ly, mythic works, historical place-names (Ségou, Djenné, Timbuktu), and symbolic landmarks (Moussa Kankan). Rarely are literary references associated with periods of production, and even less with the political circumstances of their appearances. It is true that those writers made a mark in their time on the literature of Negritude, and their works took up, with particular mastery, the themes of revolt against the colonizer, respect for traditions, or even the coming of a new African history.

Far from the stereotypes made popular in textbooks, the history of Mali disappeared behind fascinating images, even as the specialists of the genre seemed to conceal within literary configurations the social and especially the political tragedies that shook the same country over and over again. The hypothesis of Sébastien Le Potvin’s books goes beyond the preliminaries of “Black African” texts. The author capably shows that the writers who seemed to be “visionaries” for the rest of the continent had been persecuted, imprisoned, and often exiled far from their families by the successive dictatorships that held a grip with as much, if not more, cruelty than anywhere else. Their productions are thus borne along by a common destiny that should assume primary place in any analysis of related texts and contexts.

The three parts of the work clearly illustrate these dramatic trajectories and implicate, throughout the critical study, both history and literature, beginning with “l’emprise idéologique sur le discours littéraire” (1960–1968)” ‘ideological influence on literary discourse (1960–1968),’ part 1; “expressions de l’entre-cultures (1969–1991)” ‘expressions of the between-cultures period (1969–1991,’ part 2; and finally, “la parole littéraire en quête de reconnaissance de l’autonomie (1992–2004)” ‘literary work in search of the recognition of autonomy (1992–2004), part 3.’ The “volonté d’historiciser le fait littéraire” ‘will to historicize the literary’ (14) drives the author to circumscribe acts of writing within the frontiers of a given national territory, and that is often determined by the exigencies of cultures that remain fixed and thus inadequate. Without lapsing into postulates of a “national literature,” often decried in criticism, such a position has the advantage of linking the work to its immediate time, “puis aux temps prolongés de l’Histoire” ‘then to the prolonged time periods of History.’ Nevertheless, in considering “l’histoire politique de chaque pays [qui] s’est déroulée selon des évolutions intérieures propres” ‘the political history of each country as it has unfurled according to its own internal evolutions,’ the author succeeds in explaining the permanent correspondences between the institutions of legitimation and the resulting literary expressions:

Des textes créés comme des instruments de transformation sociale à la réception des mêmes textes vécus comme des outrages, les relations des écrivains avec le pouvoir et avec leur lecteur commun se caractérisent par une histoire houleuse.

From texts created as instruments of social transformation to the reception of those same texts experienced as outrages, the writers’ relationships with authority and with their common reader are characterized by a stormy history.

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To follow the historical dynamic of productions, the research is based upon the receptivity of the texts especially in scholarly and cultural milieux (notably in journals and textbooks), but it also calls upon the numerous experiences of editorial productivity that was sustained or fought by the powers in place.

This book is the result of a harvesting of first-hand facts, but also one of frank collaboration with many of Mali’s authors who confided in all lucidity, sometimes at risk of facing the repressive forces of political torturers: prison for Seydou Badian, a mysterious death for Fily Dabo Sissoko, exile in the salt desert for Yambo Ouologuem, too oppressive solitude for Ibrahima Ly or Isma...