Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (review)

Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel, by Eleni Coundouriotis. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 211 pp. ISBN 0-231-11351-X paper.

An important new contribution to the field of African literary criticism, Eleni Coundouriotis's Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel has already garnered justly deserved praise for its brilliantly incisive critique of historically naïve approaches to African fiction. The ongoing impetus to situate African fiction in relation to an "inaugural moment" in history elicits Coundouriotis's critique, for she perceives the dangers of attempting to retrieve authenticity at the cost of historicity. She also addresses the deep-seated emotions at play. "Grief at the loss of authenticity and the invention of authenticity are two aspects of the same emplotting gesture, and they are anchored in a consciousness of colonialism's humiliating rule," according to Coundouriotis (36). This grief, as well as grief at other historical injustices---from the precolonial era to the present--prompted the fictional responses that this study illuminates.

Coundouriotis opens her study with an intricate discursive genealogy that traces narrative responses to the colonial legacy of travel narratives and ethnographic works that tended to ignore the historicity of African communities. This legacy had the effect of sealing Africans in a narrative time-warp that writers like René Maran, Chinua Achebe, and Paul Hazoumé all struggled to escape. Each of these writers chose very different strategies to deal with this trap, as the comparison between Achebe and Hazoumé implicit in this study shows. Coundouriotis gives a fine analysis of the paradox engendered by a work like Things Fall Apart, which appropriates the very ethnographic strategy that the novel counters: a discourse of allochrony that implies that Ibo society could know an idyllic, ahistorical existence. In contrast, Hazoumé's novel Doguicimi is so densely packed with historical detail that some have dismissed it as insufficiently literary. Yet the novel deserves reconsideration, as Coundouriotis argues so passionately.

As she points out, Hazoumé confronted a challenging problem: he needed to account for the fact that human sacrifices did take place in the kingdom of Dahomey, yet at the same time denounce the inhumanity and hypocrisy that led the British and French to claim moral authority over the peoples they colonized. In the three chapters devoted to the problem, Coundouriotis casts new light on the question and on Hazoumé's resolution of the dilemma. She does so by contrasting his response to the sacrifices to those of British travelers, colonial officers, and ethnographers (of whom the most notable was Richard Burton) and to the ethnographic work of Melville Herskovits, a founding figure in the field of African Studies in the United States. Coundouriotis argues persuasively that the British observers' attempts to portray the violence of human sacrifice and simultaneously remove themselves from the scene in order to absolve themselves of any moral responsibility perpetrates another act of violence that takes place on the discursive level. Their complicity in the violence was not simply discursive. As Coundouriotis notes, and as Hazoumé contended, the slave economy that shaped the context of the sacrifices was created in large part by Europeans.

Coundouriotis presents a rich and varied analysis of narrative responses to issues of violence, dispossession, and authentic identity from the colonial period, raising high expectations for her analysis of postcolonial novels. She meets them admirably in her reading of Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence and Ben Okri's The Famished Road. These writers' narrative problems parallel those of the postcolonial critic in interesting ways; as Coundouriotis shows, Ouologuem attempted to write from the perspective of the dispossessed "without reenacting a further dispossession by taking over their point of view" (122). She uses narratology as her theoretical framework here to make an interesting and persuasive case for the notion that discursive transgressions allow Ouologuem to transcend the Manichean patterns of colonialism and avoid speaking for the other. Coundouriotis then shifts from the issue of voice to that of...