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Research in African Literatures 32.4 (2001) 204-206



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Book Review

Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot


Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot, by Keith L. Walker. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. x + 300 pp.

Keith Walker outlines his project of moving discussion of francophone literature beyond the boundaries traditionally imposed by geography and race. His close readings of six representative authors (Aimé Césaire, Léon Gontran Damas, Miriama Bâ, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Ken Bugal, and Gérard Etienne) reveal a commonality of subject and aim. Walker views these authors through the lens of what he calls "counter-modernism"--the inflexion of modernist esthetic practices and concepts through the contestation of the "dehumanizing excesses and legacies of colonial domination" (95). The "game of slipknot" refers to the undoing of traditional relations of race, gender, language, and cultural and sociopolitical forms of hegemony.

Walker sees the oppositional stance of René Maran's Batouala (1921) and Anténor Firmin's De l'égalité des races humaines (1885) as foreshadowing dilemmas faced by later writers, growing out of their awareness of the double standard of egalitarian values and practices in France and the [End Page 204] brutal practices and inequalities in the colonies. Francophone literature elucidates "the deracination and marginalization of populations, migration, the bordering of cultures, the sense of loss, displacement, lost harmonies, lost communities, homelessness, traditions redefined, survival, experimentation, and the attempts to recover a wholeness from cultural fragments" (37).

For Walker, "language, exile and consciousness are complementary problematics" in the colonialized writer's search for self-identity in the aggressor's language" (43). Césaire reinvented French by making it expressive of the aspirations, desires, and worldview of the francophone writer. His emancipatory project simultaneously records the specificity of the speaker and his culture and progresses towards "the unification of the commonwealth of Black speakers of French" (58) who share a past of oppression and slavery. Damas's radical sociology of humor (69) has a similar double aim: to castigate colonialist politics of assimilation while creating a sense of community drawing on shared "heritage, traditions, experiences, ideas, themes, and values" of black Antilleans (86).

Walker's perceptive reading of Bâ's Une si longue lettre innovatively links the shared rhetoric of menopause and decolonization involving "regression, decline, atrophy, shrinkage, disturbance, and the negation of reproduction" (130). But both offer as well "redefinition and rebirth" (146). Walker shows how the signifying field of Bâ's text expands from the personal to the social, to human relationships, to generational relationships, and to cultural and communal identity.

Walker views Ben Jelloun's Sand Child as a "tale of liminality" that demystifies orientalism by exposing and denouncing "the layerings and tyrannies of French, Islamic, royal, and clan patriarchy in Moroccan society, [and] the attendant condition of Moroccan women in post-independence Morocco as well as the psycho-socio-economic condition of the Moroccan male as guestworker in France" (156-57). The nomadic Ahmed/Zahra is an avatar of the latter, who suffers the trauma of displacement and role conflict (166). The "blurring of sexual identities, status, and roles parallels the borderization of cultures, the blurring of frontiers, the shifting shape of populations in the global economy" (170).

Bugul's Le baobab treats the uprooting, separation, dislocation of African woman in exile, suffering cultural schizophrenia. Her madness unfolds as "an alternative space of exploration and cogitation as she experiences the splitting of the self through the wrenching experience of exile and cultural interaction" (187). Survival for Etienne, imprisoned and tortured under Duvalier, lies in the act of testifying and bearing witness (229): "The counter-confessional testimony of the surviving political prisoner [is] a triple victory over shame, personal and collective amnesia, and the intimidation tactics of torture and human rights abuse" (229).

Walker incisively demonstrates the problematics held in common by the authors he treats, who represent the search for identity and cultural emancipation among nonmetropolitan writers of French. He revisits the question of Negritude, seen by previous critics as growing out of modernism, by convincingly arguing...

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